The Celtics, a young and wildly talented team with a young, relatively inexperienced coach, at times looked like a club playing without its foot on the pedal this past season.
The criticism came up to begin this last campaign, when Boston jumped out to a hot start on offense, but initially looked bad defensively. It returned in the playoffs when the Celtics struggled to put away the Hawks before nearly being eliminated by the Sixers in the conference semifinals. And the volume was amplified most following Boston’s 3–0 deficit against the Heat to begin the Eastern Conference finals—a stretch in which Joe Mazzulla continued to hold onto timeouts, Jayson Tatum kept struggling in fourth quarters and Jaylen Brown failed to safeguard the ball.
All of which raises a question: If this is a team that often needs a fire lit underneath it—much like the one it had near the middle of the 2021–22 campaign before making a run to the NBA Finals—then why are the Celtics trading away Marcus Smart, their heart and proverbial soul?
