I think people are frustrated, especially those that had the team winning 60-65 games this year.
(I thought 57-59 wins. Never thought 60 was in play unless things went perfectly. Things don't usually go perfectly. I am still pretty frustrated with the team, though I think considerably less than most.)
And with frustration comes needing to vent and for most people to blame. The problem is, when placing blame people usually use tunnel vision and look at players/coaches they aren't great fans of and scapegoat that player or coach and subsequently that player or coach gets the blame for making players/coaches the people prefer perform worse.
The fact is, this season has been and could end up a failure, but it would be an organizational failure. There isn't anyone from Ainge all the way down to Wanamaker and Williams that don't hold some responsibility for this season.
Hey, leave Brad (Wanamaker) out of this!
I think that most people who spend enough time on their Celtics fandom that they would read or post in this forum tend to look toward the Celtics for a regular source of enjoyment, entertainment, and perhaps even emotional uplift during difficult / depressing times and/or just the drag of a long New England winter.
So when people expect the Celtics to be a ton of fun and then, pretty much all season long, they are a complete drag and disappointment, that's gonna tend to result in sad, hurt feelings.
Because we're New Englanders, the way we are most comfortable expressing sadness is via deeply resentful and irrational anger.
This is spot-on. If I expect them to be mediocre and they're mediocre, fine; but when I expect them to be pushing 60 wins and they may not even reach 50, that's pretty disappointing.
There's surely a lot of blame to go around, but since Stevens and Tatum are the subject of this thread, I'll say that they certainly share in the blame.
Stevens made a horrible miscalculation in starting Hayward at the beginning of the season. And despite Stevens being one of the best at getting less-talented teams to overachieve, he seems to not know what to do when he actually has a good deal of talent to work with.
As for Tatum, he's been inconsistent (like a lot of this year's Celtics), he's taken WAY too many midrange shots, he's been a bad defender, and (most annoyingly for me) he complains to the refs after just about every one of his shots. Basically, he's become Kobe without the high scoring output.