Carry That Weight

Shank talks to Celtics head basketball guy Brad Stevens and the expectations for the upcoming season:

Brad Stevens is fine with the pressure of being a favorite: ‘The weight of expectations is a good thing’

Brad Stevens is 47 now and the Celtics are his team, the way they were Red Auerbach’s team in the golden days, and the way they were Danny Ainge’s team the last time they won an NBA championship in 2008.

Since the Celtics lost Game 7 of the Eastern Conference finals May 29, Stevens has traded Marcus Smart, Robert Williams III, and Malcolm Brogdon, and said goodbye to Grant Williams while acquiring 7-foot-3-inch Kristaps Porzingis and All-Star Jrue Holiday to join veteran superstars Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown.

Those big, bold moves — coupled with the sagging fortunes of New England’s once-vaunted Patriots and Red Sox — have pushed Green Team expectations through the banner-festooned Garden roof on the eve of this new NBA season.

What do you say, Brad? Can you live with the championship-or-failure mentality that blankets the region at this critical hour?

“I know what’s coming,” says the ever-flatline president of Celtic basketball operations. “The weight of expectations is a good thing. The responsibility of putting on a Celtic uniform is part of it here. It’s something we’re more excited about than not. I’d rather people think we’re really good heading into a season. That means we’ve got some good things going.”

So now that massive expectations are out there, how many losses will it take before Shank starts ragging on the team?

DHL Dan CLVII - Piling On The Celtics

We saw Shank swipe themes from The Sports Hub and do a column on the Celtics earlier this week. Today he keeps going:

Getting an early take on the Celtics from Brad Stevens, and other thoughts

Picked-up pieces while trying to watch the Celtics without thinking about how much better the NBA was when Bird & Co. roamed the parquet …

▪ The 2021-22 Celtics have already received a full season’s worth of local scorn for hideous losses, blown leads, and the appearance of internal strife. They seemed to respond positively after veteran Marcus Smart called them out earlier in the week, but they still haven’t won a home game yet.

Never mind that the two games since Smart's callout were both road games; it's just another way to criticize the team.

Brad Stevens coached these guys for eight years and now serves as president of basketball operations (the new Danny Ainge). I caught up with Stevens Friday morning after the Celtics’ impressive blowout of the Heat in Miami Thursday.

Shank On The Celtics' Front Office Changes

I'm kind of impressed that Shank banged this one out in under two hours:

A weird, abrupt ending for Danny Ainge, a daunting new challenge for Brad Stevens with Celtics

It happened overnight.

Literally.

The soft and annoying Boston Celtics of 2020-21 were eliminated from the playoffs Tuesday evening in Brooklyn, a 123-109 noncompetitive whimper at the end of one of the most disappointing local sports seasons of all time.

And then, after a meeting back in Boston Wednesday morning, the team issued a press release at 11:01 a.m. announcing that Danny Ainge was retiring and coach Brad Stevens would be leaving the bench and moving into Ainge’s position as president of basketball operations.

Love the picture - Ainge looks like he's in a hostage video.

Something Borrowed, Something Blue

While I'll quibble a bit about it being something confined to basketball, Shank cranks out a very good column about the basketball coaching community.

Basketball coaches are a collegial bunch. High school. College. Professional. It doesn’t matter. Brad Stevens, John Wooden, Red Auerbach, Norman Dale, and the guy who coached you in high school 50 years ago are all members of the same club. They borrow from one another. And they tweak old plays that have been around since James Naismith and the peach basket.

I’ll never forget something Stevens said in Cleveland last October. We were standing in the bowels of Quicken Loans Arena a few minutes before the launch of this Celtics season when somebody asked the coach about the unusual number of high school and college coaches who attended Celtic practices during the 2017 preseason.

Dope Springs Eternal

Here's the stunning problem with The CHB's column on the Celtics today: He whines that the Celtics' loss to the Hawks in round 1 of the NBA Playoffs last night demonstrated their lack of talent, while conveniently ignoring that two of their top three players were out for effectively the entire season.

Question: Have the Celtics progressed enough in the 3 years under Stevens? The CHB answers his own question: Wins have risen from 25 to 40 to 48. That's a 23 game swing. The next best positive gain in that time frame? Milwaukee, with 10. The C's finished with the 7th best record overall in the NBA. Could anyone have seen that two years ago? Of course not. Would you have been pleased if, two years ago, you were guaranteed a 48 win season by now? Of course you would.

What The CHB seems to forget is that to actually, you know, win a championship, you first have to make the playoffs. So while he's extolling the virtues of the Timberwolves, which he has been doing on the radio for some time, let's remember that the Wolves, with Wiggins, Rubio and Townes, won a total of 29 games this year. They are about as far from the playoffs as The CHB is from getting laid by a woman.

It's a talent league, and the C's don't have enough talent. But truthfully, neither do the Thunder with Durant and Westbrook, or the Clippers with Paul and Griffin. The Bulls have two players -- Butler and Rose -- better than anyone on the Celtics, and didn't even make the playoff. So why insinuate Celtics coach Brad Stevens isn't up to the task, except to be contrarian?

More memory problems. Wasn't The CHB just saying "Our winter sports teams are good again. There will be playoffs and it might not be as bad and bloody as we once feared. ... [T]he local sports landscape is brighter today"?