You’ve Got Everything Now

Anonymous, Venetian Feast, c. 1550.

It’s a misnomer that we, the professional basketball-viewing public, refer to this time as “the second half of the season” – in reality, NBA teams have less than thirty games to figure their way to self-determination. Whether this means coaches going from pencil to pen with their post-trade deadline lineups before the playoffs or, in the cases of a few franchises in any given season, dropping chalkboards entirely, settling in only once this time means getting serious about whatever you’re about.

To nobody’s surprise, the All-Star Weekend went off without a hitch – but with many complaints. Once the kingmaking event of the weekend, the dunk contest has descended to stars being afraid to measure up to the expectations that earlier dunk contests have set[1]. The other events have made their parameters so esoteric as to be unapproachable to – no, not even the average viewer, but to anybody. While this all happened less than a week ago, it now feels like it was a decade or two in the past. Memory retention, “recent events,” taking out the recycling.

In this same uncertain timeframe, it feels like the Boston Celtics have been contenders, never quite breaking through but always capital-T The Threat. Even after the Bucks won the title in 2021, the Celtics had some legitimate claims to the throne. Right now, here, is this: it’s the time for this Boston Celtics team. With respect to Brown, it’s the time for Jayson Tatum, the player who entered the league a year later than he but solidified a vision of what a wing-wing title contender could look like. Cycling through Kemba Walker, Kyrie Irving and others, the Brown-Tatum tandem has remained.

One of the participants in this year’s dunk contest, by far the most notable, was Jaylen Brown. Signed to the largest contract in NBA history last summer basically out of necessity, Brown’s re-signing signaled that this was it: something like this version of the Celtics, which we’ve seen in some form or other since 2018, would be the one to raise us all out of the post-Ubuntu[2]/Doc Rivers (heh) haze that has permeated this franchise since 2008. This time, though, it had better be.

We’re all under the squeeze: you feel it in your job uncertainty, or the sudden and drastic price increase of Hellmann’s, or the thought that maybe your tires don’t need rotating, and you can go bald with them in solidarity. None of this is your fault, really, but you’ll accept it, and then you’ll get laid off later for reasons having nothing to do with performance, but they also don’t have to do with Jaylen Brown. I digress[3].

Apparently in the midst of a PR campaign to show it, Tatum does have a claim as the face of the NBA, at least insofar as the American-viewing public sees it – a discomfort that seeing several consecutive recipients of the MVP award as not being from here, these United States, might ignite.

Proven time and again, Tatum is staring at a few crossing patterns: he did not arrive to the same preemptive acclaim as LeBron, nor Kyrie, nor even Zion; he is a Black player who went to Duke, and he is also the best Celtic since Larry Bird. Even as a number three pick in 2018, he had big hypothetical shoes staring at him.

He seems to legitimately want the teamwide success that his exploits have thus far invited. Tatum’s game lends itself to the beauty that – alright, sure, because it carries this implication – transcends generations. Jab steps, midrange cuts that defenses don’t plan for, stepbacks that result in stepbacks for someone else: plenty of players have the mindset[4] but aren’t capable of actually Doing It to the degree that Tatum is.

These Celtics probably aren’t the best Brown-Tatum group they’ve had, but they are almost certainly in the best position to actually win a title than they’ve ever been. With respect to the Bucks, Knicks, Cavaliers, Sixers and whatever team might rise in the injury-riddled meantime that ends up being the last stretch before the playoffs[5], the East is open in a way that predates the Pistons->LeBron aughts->teens reign.

Sure, the Miami Heat always pose a problem, if only because Jimmy Butler-via-Pat Riley-via-Eric Spoelstra has decided to make it his mission to wear himself out, tiny mug in hand, turning himself into the greatest midrange shooter ever in the playoffs (small sample size, but: hello again, Mike) and empowering Bam Adebayo – Tatum’s draft classmate out of Kentucky – beyond the all-defense, All-Star levels he regularly reaches.

Sure, they beat the Chicago Bulls in the first game back after All Star Weekend. While encouraging in a “I didn’t lose my credit card at the bar” sort of way, if the Boston Celtics in their current form are going to win the championship, they’re going to do it this season, which means they have to keep up what they’ve been doing, which is what they’ve also done in multiple prior seasons to this. If not, something has to change – the stars, Brown and Tatum, seem amicable enough with each other as to make this work, but it’s rarely up to the players – and they end up as OKC 2.0.

Central to what the Eastern Conference is now, they are certainly more than equipped. Jaylen Brown is one of the best basketball players alive, and also is the best 1A player for which anyone could ask. The draft picks from the Nets trade worked out, so much as the unknown in Brooklyn can play out (the Nets, now, are unassailably terrible, and also directionless without much control over their future draft picks; these are things that Cavaliers and Knicks fans revel in pointing out, which is why this is a parenthetical rather than a footnote, but here’s a footnote:[6]).

As always, the question arrives: is a team featuring wings, all-world yet perhaps not transcendent on their own, at the forefront enough? It’s never a question of whether they’re good enough, because good enough teams figure it out either way. This edition of the Boston Celtics has the chance to answer in their own affirmative. If not, this summer figures to be nothing short of a doozy.

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[1] “I’ve never had a dunk/because I’m too shy” – Connie Hawkins via Morrissey, Elgin Baylor, George Gervin, Dr. J, Michael Jordan, Dominique Hawkins, Dwight Howard, Aaron Gordon…

[2] Hello, Movers.

[3] Nothing to do with anything, but I’ve noticed that James Baldwin uses “But I anticipate” in the way that we now use “But I digress.” Could he have possibly been revealing anything more ahead of what he wrote than he did? Anyway, yes, I’ve been reading Baldwin heavily recently, again.

[4] You know who, I know who; we both probably love him, but we both probably don’t like to talk about him, and anyway, I am sick of Michael Jordan, who is not that guy but very much influenced that guy.

[5] I see you, one of the Pacers/Magic/Heat group, and the rest of the play-in heroes.

[6] Hi, Katrina!