Have the Celtics forgotten all the hard lessons they learned along the way? (2025)

Celtics

After last year, I never thought this group of players, this team, would allow an opportunity to slip from their grasp again.

By Chad Finn, The Boston Globe

May 9, 2025 | 9:13 AM

4 minutes to read

COMMENTARY

Their degree of difficulty is now steeper than Heartbreak Hill, and if they don’t get their collective act together in Game 3 Saturday afternoon in New York, the Celtics are going to own a new heartbreak of their own, one almost entirely self-inflicted.

The 18th banner, collected last summer, dangles from the Garden rafters as a lovely green-and-white reminder of what this team — which retained every significant player from a year ago — can achieve when at its best.

The Celtics, homegrown stars Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown in particular, overcame past playoff agonies (plural), and seasons of growing pains to win that championship. It was a triumph of perseverance more than anything else.

Which is one of many, many reasons why their pending status as Mike Tyson to the Knicks’ Buster Douglas is so frustrating.

Right now, after blowing a 20-point third quarter lead in back-to-back excruciating losses to Jalen Brunson and his relentless friends to open this Eastern Conference semifinals series, it’s all too easy to look up at that newest banner and wonder if the Celtics have forgotten all of the hard lessons they absorbed along the way.

After last year, I never thought this group of players, this team, would allow an opportunity to slip from their grasp again. But here they are, forcing us to ponder the ’22 Finals loss to the Warriors, when Steph Curry and their own immaturity conspired against them, and the 3-0 deficit to the Heat that turned into Game 7 devastation in ’23, and all of these memories that were supposed to be history to be learned from and never repeated.

It’s so frustrating, all of it, starting with the basic truth that the Celtics, Tatum in particular, keep missing open shots that they would normally make, lousy shooting becoming a contagion. They took an absurd 60 3-pointers in Game 1, missing 45 while going for the knockout blow brick by brick by brick in the third quarter until the energy had shifted and the Knicks were back in the game.

They cut that number of 3-point attempts to a more tenable 40 in Game 2, made exactly 25 percent of them again (10), and in the meantime muffed an assortment of layups, struggled to find open lanes to the basket, and habitually turned 10-footers into 14-footers with way too many fadeaways, Tatum and Brown specifically.

Yeah, those are frustrations. There are more, many more, such as the habit of forcing the ball to Kristaps Porzingis — whose mystery ailment is officially alarming — whenever he checks into the game. When he’s at his best, feeding him at the elbow and watching him shoot over helpless smaller defenders is close to a surefire way of adding 2 points to the ledger. But he has been nowhere near right during these playoffs, and Tatum must have a half-dozen turnovers casually forcing the ball Porzingis’s way.

It’s frustrating that the Celtics are absolutely abysmal at closing quarters — they’d have two easy wins in this series if each quarter were 10 minutes rather than 12.

It’s frustrating that everything feels off with the Celtics at the worst possible time. When even Jrue Holiday is making mental mistakes, as he did in fouling Brunson while going for a steal at the end of Game 2, it’s apparent that the Celtics have entered Bizarro World and have no idea where to locate the exits.

In one particular instance, calling their current plight frustrating is actually a wild understatement. It’s downright infuriating — or will be if they don’t conduct themselves with an urgency bordering on fury in Game 3 ­­— that they’re playing like they have all the time in the world together as a team, rather than with the urgency that comes with the blunt truth that one or two or three of them very likely will not be back next year due to the financial penalties of the “second apron,” a term we all wish we had never heard of in the first place.

Do the Celtics realize that this could be their last hurrah under the current construction as one of the most enjoyable Celtics teams in decades?

There’s one more frustration to be found here, and it might just be with you. I’ve heard from way too many people, particularly on social media, that I had no idea were Knicks fans until now. They’re annoying, and half of them are probably inauthentic, but they’re not as annoying as Celtics fans who seem to enjoy skipping right over what Tatum and Brown and this group achieved last season to dredge up their old complaints. Yes, Tatum is not Larry Bird. No one is, pal.

These two games have been extremely frustrating. The Celtics have been discombobulated in every way. They face a grueling uphill battle against a genuinely tough team. And they did this to themselves. All true.

Also true: These Celtics deserve their due for what they achieved last year, and that journey should help them. We’re about to find out for sure which lessons were learned, and which ones never stuck.

I’ll go on the record here, a positive voice in the cacophony: Shots will finally fall. Tatum will get it together. Experience will prevail.

They’re dragging now, but they will climb the hill without heartbreak running them down.

Celtics in 7.

This can’t end now. Not to those guys, and not yet.