From 'Gap Year' to Heartbreak: Why this Boston Celtics Season Was Still a Big Success

Expectations infiltrate our brains and rearrange our thoughts. They grow and shift, feeding on results to hypnotize us into anticipation of something that may never come.

The expectations of the Boston Celtics coming into this past season started out pretty low. Prevailing thoughts ranged from tanking for a draft pick to maybe making the playoffs and hopefully winning a round. Brad Stevens handed Joe Mazzulla a mismatched roster with a center rotation of Neemias Queta, Luka Garza, and Chris Boucher. Jayson Tatum was still only about five months into his rehab.

The term “gap year” was thrown around, becoming bulletin board material, helping fuel an incredible run from lingering around the 10th or 11th seed in November to never worse than third by December 20. It’s not exactly a Golden Tempo kind of run, but they blew some minds as their kick was happening. Especially when they made Oklahoma City and San Antonio sweat.

Every time they defied an expectation, they fed it a result that changed our minds. Every win that we didn’t see coming was another boost for the growing expectations in our minds.

“When you start winning at a high level in a city like this, there's one thing that's on people's minds,” Luka Garza said during his exit interview. “Things changed really quickly throughout the year, but it's a blessing that they were able to change. And obviously, that's just what comes with it. When you start to win and put yourself in that position, those are the expectations that come with it.”

There isn’t much more fun than watching an expectation grow. Queta became a legitimate starting center. Garza grabbed a million offensive rebounds. Hugo Gonzalez made exciting plays. Baylor Scheierman became a cult hero.

They won close games and blowouts. They won because Jaylen Brown scored and passed. They won because Mazzulla pressed all the right buttons.

It was a blast. But it also turned the season into the Price is Right Cliffhangers game. We spent all season yodeling our way to the top of the mountain, expecting to stop there and celebrate. We never considered that we might fall over the top.

“Obviously when you start a season, you think you're going to be playing until June every single year. That's the expectation, especially being in Boston and with the Celtics,” Sam Hauser said. “The standard is a championship and when you fall short of that, it's disappointing. But there's a lot of good that we can take from this year and a lot of things that we can build off of.”

This season was always about Brad Stevens and his front office trying to figure out who they had in some of these players. They needed to figure out who the keepers were and who could be upgraded this summer. It was less a basketball season and more of a controlled experiment for the Celtics to build a true contender around Tatum and Brown this summer.

Along the way, he kept insisting he’d never put a ceiling on this team, because each new height they reached gave him more information about what he truly had. Joe Mazzulla and his players used the low expectations of the season to fuel themselves and prove people wrong, which was great information for Stevens.

They were the NBA’s version of the Artemis mission. There were a lot of questions at the beginning but it ended up being a hell of a ride. The only difference is Artemis landed where she expected to.

The Celtics did not. And now because expectations grew into such a massive beast, there is backlash. The Celtics did not perform well after taking their 3-1 lead on the Sixers, and now they're getting ripped apart for it. They deserve a fair amount of criticism for how that series ended. They had it and let it slip away. They didn’t do things they were capable of, which is a failure Mazzulla, Brown, and Tatum have to live with. It’s a failure Stevens will have to correct this summer.

Two things can be true here. The Celtics botched the final three games of the series and will have to take the slings and arrows that come with that. People will calm down over time.

But also, this was a great season. They gave us something to believe in and we all bought into it. Thinking back on how the season started, some version of this ending was probably something we always should have expected. Instead of making us trudge through a middling season of fighting for a sixth seed and losing in the first round, they gave us this thrill. The beginning and the end of his movie might have been predictable, but how the two were connected was nothing like any of us expected.

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