It's one thing to lose.
It another to get blown out.
It's one thing to lose your last game of the season.
It's another thing to get embarrassed in your last game of the season, a 116-91 thumping that marked the Celtics' fourth straight loss in their second-round playoff series against the Milwaukee Bucks. It's another thing to lose two straight games on your homecourt, then not show up for the last one on the road.
Welcome to the Boston Celtics, who in a better [...]
It's one thing to lose.
It another to get blown out.
It's one thing to lose your last game of the season.
It's another thing to get embarrassed in your last game of the season, a 116-91 thumping that marked the Celtics' fourth straight loss in their second-round playoff series against the Milwaukee Bucks. It's another thing to lose two straight games on your homecourt, then not show up for the last one on the road.
Welcome to the Boston Celtics, who in a better basketball world would have given their fans all their money back after bowing out of the NBA playoffs much sooner than most people expected.
Just pack up and get out of the Garden, and hope that no one remembers the specifics.
The Celtics can only hope.
Because this wasn't just another end to another season on Wednesday night.
This was a symbolic statement that this is a Celtics' team that needs a reboot. Forget the score for a second. It speaks for itself. This was worse than the score. This was the kind of loss that puts everything under a microscope. The kind of loss where no one escapes the scrutiny. Like Celtics' coach Brad Stevens, who looked afterwards as though he had seen the Ghost of Seasons Past; as though he had just seen a sneak preview of what happens when your team underachieves, and no one really cares how good your college teams at Butler once were.
Like NBA diva Kyrie Irving, who came up short against the Bucks. And when he does that, the Celtics are like a band whose lead singer is AWOL.
In short, Kyrie without his Superman cape, reveals all the warts, takes away all the illusions. And what were the Celtics, after all, but a team that lived on illusions, the biggest one being that Kyrie somehow could lead them to the Promise Land, virtually by himself.
We all should have known better.
We all should have known that "Kyrie Against The World" was just a fantasy, and like all fantasies it eventually was going to go poof into the night.
In the end, this series reinforced some elemental basketball truth: the best team usually wins, and the team with the better players usually wins. And if you hadn't noticed, the best player on the court was Milwaukee's Giannis Antetokounmpo. No big surprise.
So what now?
That's the question, as Danny Ainge, the Celtics president of basketball operations, looks into the future.
These are the Celtics, and they come with expectations. Do you try to keep Kyrie and build around his wondrous talents? Or do you let him go to free agency and build around the young talent? Or do you try to blend it all together, which might be more difficult than it sounds? That is Ainge's big decision.
Either way, it won't be easy.
No one wants to hear about rebuilding. No one wants to hear about the future. Professional sports is about the present tense, especially in Boston. It's about now. What have you done for me lately? What's your record? How good are you? Can you get to the playoffs? How far can you go?
These are the questions fans want answers to. Everything else is just blowing in the wind, fodder for barroom arguments and sports radio.
Right now the Celtics are a mess.
The results tell us that.
Their swoon against the Bucks tells us that.
Professional sports is the ultimate bottom-line business. Win or go home.
Save the excuses for later.
Save all the lessons from sports for high school locker rooms.
This is about winning; nothing else. No lessons in sportsmanship. No building character. No lifelong lessons.
Winning.