17. Boston Celtics

Key Losses: Basically just Gigi Datome and Flip Pressey. Seriously, this team has like a billion guys on it right now. We’re all praying a trade is imminent, but I’m not holding my breath. BTW: because of arcane salary cap rules, the Celtics renounced their rights to many players this summer. Here’s the hilarious list: Carlos Arroyo, Mark Bryant, P.J. Brown, Michael Finley, Nenad Krstic, Grant Long, Stephon Marbury, Shaquille O’Neal, Michael Olowokandi, Scot Pollard, Chris Wilcox, Dana Barros, and Roshown McLeod. Get all those guys in their prime, and you might really have something!

Key Additions: David Lee, Amir Johnson, Terry Rozier, R.J. Hunter, Jordan Mickey, Perry Jones III.

You hope, I guess, to be dispassionate when it comes time to evaluate what you love, but eventually you end up having to acknowledge the impossibility of such a thing. “To be wise and love / Exceeds man’s might,” says Cressida. Perhaps it is an issue of space, not in the sense of the natural laws of physics, but rather in the capabilities of the mind itself, where love leaves little room for evaluation. You try to be impartial and end up in the forest trilling, “O wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful / wonderful! and yet again wonderful.”

I love the Celtics. I always have. When I’m sitting on my couch at the end of the day, and I put on a Celtics game, and the color green flashes around my television screen like leaves on a warm, June morning, I feel a melting in me. Yes, I live and die, as they say, with the results of the games, wins and losses and such, but there’s a kind of peace in just watching. There’s a cynical view of it, I know. People will remind you that you are rooting for laundry, essentially. I feel bad for them. I pity them the things they fail to understand and that I can’t possibly explain. With love, you just know.

Now for some real basketball analysis, though I remain, of course, under the spell of the crazy flashings of love. There’s a cliche in sports that goes something like this: “That’s why they play the games”; that is to say, no matter how fixed an outcome may seem prior to competition, the competition itself exists in a fundamental state of unpredictability. Very few things in life have probabilities equaling one or zero, and an NBA season’s outcome is certainly not among those.

The Celtics are one of the teams that could win the championship this year. Literally, any of the 30 NBA teams could. But I’m not talking about mathematical probabilities here; I’m talking hoops. The Celtics had the second best winning percentage in the Eastern Conference over the second half of last season. Yes, they were ritually slaughtered by LeBron James in the first round of the playoffs, but they have made some serious roster improvements in the meantime. They have legitimate weapons now. An Isaiah Thomas/David Lee pick-and-roll can be the foundation of a good NBA offense, and guys like Avery Bradley, Jae Crowder, and Amir Johnson can be good defenders given the right schemes.

At this point it’s a cliche that the Celtics’ pursuit of superstar-level talent on the roster has been usurped by the fact that they wound up hiring a superstar-level coach in Brad Stevens. For the past few years, I’ve been ranting and raving about the fact that your best chance of getting a transcendent player on your team is to bottom out and luck into a high draft pick in the right draft. Stevens screwed all that up by getting a roster of garbage basketball players to cohere enough to win games against more disorganized and dysfunctional squads with “better” talent.

You can poke all kinds of holes in that “second best winning percentage” stat I cited a couple paragraphs ago. Over that same stretch, the C’s were just fifth in the conference in NetRtg, which is a far better way of thinking about these things. Still, Stevens seems to have the rare ability—and I realize I’m reaching beyond the gravitational pull of what is measurable here—to get players to view the game more granularly. If you can win one possession, you can win a game. If you can win a game, you can win a series. If you can win a series, well, you know.

The Celtics do not, by any stretch of the imagination, have a perfect roster, but I’m starting to think they might have a perfect coach, and they’re in a perfect position to pounce with their bank vault of trade assets if an opportunity to upgrade the roster becomes available. They have young players (James Young, I’m looking at you here) who have major potential. They’re deep and unpredictable. They are unfinished. They are waiting for the copestone, but you can see a real dignity in the architecture, and am I crazy or is that a beautiful sky up there behind everything, or what? Do you see it? Do you? Or am I just a fool in love?

– The Buzzard