LeBron James Makes Bold Celtics Claim After Downfall to Knicks

The Boston Celtics met a brutal end to their season that rivals what any other fanbase of a playoff team has had to endure in the last month.

Sure, their record-18 championship banners will hold many back from feeling bad for the successful franchise, but in the span of just a week they had to change their sights to repeating as champions into seriously evaluating how much the rest of the decade they can salvage.

The short-term pain of blowing numerous double-digit leads to the New York Knicks, as painful as it was, will be forgotten when trying to reckon with Jayson Tatum tearing his Achilles tendon in a pivotal Game 4 loss and how that shifts the window for a team that wasn't built for the long term. Contracts will have to be offloaded as they abandon the hope of competing next year, with centerpiece Tatum guaranteed to miss out on the vast majority of the 2025-26 regular season.

Their dismissal in the second round is also the earliest they've been eliminated from the postseason since 2021, with blown leads in Games 1, 2 and 4 ultimately putting them on the ropes when Tatum went down. Had it not been for their lackadaisical closes to matchups earlier in the series, both teams could be facing different fates in the final series outcome.

While some analysts have gone out of their way to discredit the Knicks in blaming the Celtics' loss purely on injuries, others are just trying to call it like they see it. LeBron James tries to put basketball first on his "Mind the Game" podcast with Steve Nash, and didn't try to overcomplicate his thoughts on why Boston repeatedly found themselves fumbling big leads.

"It seems like they get bored sometimes," the Los Angeles Lakers legend said. "When you look at [Jayson] Tatum and [Jaylen] Brown, this is years and years and years and years... they've punched their 10,000 hours. Sometimes they get a little bored because of how great they are. Not only those two as individuals, but as a team"

LeBron on the Boston Celtics:

“Sometimes they get a little bored because of how great they are.” 😳👀

via @mindthegamepod

pic.twitter.com/flxm89nZ9q
— NBA Retweet (@RTNBA) May 20, 2025

Some of what he was saying didn't need 22 years in the league and countless matchups against the Celtics like James has accumulated; Boston's style of raining 3-pointers resulted in some uncreative offense down the stretch of several games, particularly the first two in which New York bounced back from 20-point deficits to take a 2-0 lead with their superior fourth quarters.

It's an issue that the Celtics won't have any chance to rectify in the coming months. While the Knicks get to look forward to their first Eastern Conference Finals appearance in 25 years, the ousted contenders will have to do everything in their power to keep the boat afloat for when Tatum returns to maintain anything close to their current status.

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