NBA Fact or Fiction: Are these Celtics worth rooting for?

[ad_1]

Each week during the 2023-24 NBA season, we will take a deeper dive into some of the league’s biggest storylines in an attempt to determine whether trends are based more in fact or fiction moving forward.

[Last week: Does Nikola Jokić have any challengers in the MVP race?]

This week’s topic: The Boston Celtics are worth rooting for

This campaign has been a strange sensation for Boston Celtics fans. Everything rides on their playoff performance and has since last year, when they fell behind 3-0 in the Eastern Conference finals, forced a Game 7 against the eighth-seeded Miami Heat and blew a chance to reach a second straight NBA Finals.

Since they built a double-digit lead over the second-place Milwaukee Bucks in the East standings, the biggest rooting interest in them is for good health. Just please get Kristaps Porziņģis to the postseason.

Now it’s here, and the pressure shifts. No team has more to prove this spring than the Celtics.

By any measure, this has been a historic regular season in Boston. The only two rosters in the NBA’s 77-year history to yield a higher net rating than these Celtics (+11.4 points per 100 possessions) are all-timers — Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls, who finished the 1995-96 and 1996-97 seasons with a combined record of 171-30, including playoffs, en route to two of their six titles in the 1990s, and the 2016-17 Golden State Warriors, who added Kevin Durant to a 73-win squad and coasted to the championship.

Win the title, and you are a G.O.A.T.; lose, and you are a goat. No alternatives.

To the basketball world outside Boston, these Celtics are choke artists. They have made five conference finals in seven years, reached a single Finals and stumbled over themselves on the biggest stage. People enjoy seeing them lose, since the city has won so much — 12 major sports titles since 2001, to be exact.

There is plenty of anxiety to be had in the possibility that they cement that legacy this season, that ownership refuses to foot the bill for a roster that cannot win it all, no matter how good they may be — that doubt overcomes hope, and they are destined to become the ’90s Utah Jazz, a…

[ad_2]
Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/nba-fact-or-fiction-are-these-celtics-worth-rooting-for-183631972.html

Author : Yahoo Sports

Publish date : 2024-04-12 18:36:31

Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source.