I'm pretty tired of this year's team. I'm ready to be done watching them, frankly. I feel they've disappointed me just too many times. They don't seem to really have their hearts in the season, so it's hard for me to put my heart into following them.
With that said, I felt the same way about the 2010 team by about February, as well. I came to love them by April, when they dispatched the hated LeBroniers in 6.
The difference is, that team was less than two years removed from winning a championship, a title won by defeating LeBron, the former champion Pistons, and the Kobe Lakers.
This Celtics team beat a couple of flawed teams in the first two rounds of the playoffs last year and then dropped a home Game 7 against a team that was basically LeBron, injured Kevin Love, and a bunch of scrubs.
So I'm reserving some tepid enthusiasm for the playoffs, just because I've seen in the past that a team can sleepwalk through the regular season and then give us a post-season worth being excited about.
But we've also seen that this team is much, much better at home than on the road, and they are almost certainly going to be opening the playoffs on the road. They will probably open against a Philly team that is much more talented than the one they faced last year, and that will be extremely motivated to destroy the Celtics in Philadelphia.
I'm well known as a pessimist, but the way I see this playing out is the Celts lose a hard fought 6 or 7 game series in round one. I think we'll look back at this team as one that could have made the Finals if they'd played up to their potential and earned the home court advantage they needed to go deep in the playoffs. They will live in Celtics history as a team that played like a group of individuals whose ideas of themselves were bigger than the notion that they had of what they might accomplish as a group, and who could never muster a consistent focus on the things that lead to winning.
Am I excited for the off-season though? I guess. I think "anxious" is probably closer to how I feel about that. Ainge is going to try to trade for Anthony Davis, and then use that acquisition to convince Kyrie to stay.
That may very well come to pass, which would be exciting. But will it change anything about the general mood and culture that currently permeates the atmosphere around this team and makes it so hard to enjoy?
If an Anthony Davis trade doesn't come to pass, does that mean we simply keep Kyrie and hope that bringing back this same basic group will yield different results next year?
Or does Kyrie leave us in the lurch? What will Ainge do when all of his planning has left him without a single established superstar?
At this point I just want to have a team with a stable, likable core that plays an appealing style and brings consistent effort and focus almost every night, if not every night. I'd obviously prefer that team to be one of the favorites to win the title in any given year, but my feeling is I'd rather watch a 50 win team I love than a 55-60 win team that seems miserable and internally conflicted every step of the way.
I guess my answer is playoffs? But I'm not feeling great about any of it, at the moment.
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Topic: Are you more excited about the playoffs or the off-season? (Read 14254 times)