Tag: 2020 Boston Celtics

Remembering the longest year in Celtics Wire’s top five stories of 2020

These were our top stories of 2020.

2020 might just have been the most chaotic year in the history of the NBA, but with a foundation like no other, the sport not only survived a global pandemic, but thrived and set the gold standard for how to hold a team sport season in the midst of the era of COVID-19.

From Utah Jazz center Rudy Gobert’s positive test and the subsequent shutdown lasting nearly four months, nationwide protests for racial justice taking place at the same time — the league successfully navigated several major crises to make a restart at Walt Disney World a success. It was truly the wildest of rides imaginable.

Let’s not forget the loss of Los Angeles Laker Kobe Bryant, or the passing of Celtic greats Tommy Heinsohn and K.C. Jones — nor the arrival of Kemba Walker and the outstanding season Boston put together despite all the chaos around them.

Here at the Celtics Wire, we’re glad you were along for the ride — let’s take a look back at the top stories of one of the most memorable years in league history in ever sense of the word.

Boston a solid 4th-place in The Athletic’s new NBA Power Rankings

The Boston Celtics were given some anti-Gordon Hayward offseason homework in The Athletic’s latest power rankings.

Fresh off the heels of getting hit with a lowly fourth-place finish in ESPN’s much-too-early NBA power rankings, the Boston Celtics find themselves in a much more reasonable fourth-place finish in The Athletic’s latest round of league power rankings.

Trailing only the Los Angeles Lakers, Denver Nuggets and Miami Heat, there’s a solid case to be made for all three to be ahead of Boston next season in terms of future success, which is one of the primary foci of analyst Zach Harper when putting the list together.

The Athletic writer believes Boston’s biggest offseason priority is turning Gordon Hayward’s contract (presuming, we assume, Hayward opts into his final season of this deal) into multiple, lesser bench players.

His rationale?

“The Boston Celtics aren’t hurt by having Hayward on the roster. He’s a valuable rotation guy for them. But re-allocating the $34 million he’ll be owed (once he exercises his player option) with two or three players would be ideal for a roster with such a short bench. The Celtics have a real chance to compete for a title, but they need depth more than they need an expensive forward when they already have Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown to lead them.”

Harper trusts the Celtics moving forward as much as anyone in the East save perhaps the Miami Heat, and thinks the team is “set up to be a problem in both the regular season and the postseason.”

While it’s true that the Butler product is exactly the sort of player Boston could use to compete at such a level, and while his injury history has been an unusually unlucky one, his poor luck only underscores the import of having available bodies able to play.

Add in that if that cap space should leave through some unforeseen outcome at the end of next season, it’s gone barring internal improvement worth rewarding to those levels, and it’s hard to argue against Harper’s position.

Even if we hold Hayward in the highest of regards.

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Cedric Maxwell ‘100% confident’ Tatum extends; wants a Baynes reunion

Celtic champ and color commentator Cedric Maxwell thinks Jayson Tatum is a lock to extend in Boston, and wants to see Aron Baynes back on the Celtics.

With the arrival of the offseason for the Boston Celtics comes attempts at prognosticating their next moves, and few people not actually on the Celtics know the team better than former Boston forward and current color commentator Cedric Maxwell.

In a recent appearance on the popular local radio show Toucher and Rich, the Celtic champion weighed in on what he thought was going to happen in the team’s long- and short-term future.

The most important order of business will be extending All-NBA forward Jayson Tatum beyond his current rookie deal, now headed into its fourth and final season.

Does Maxwell think there’s any chance the Duke product will sign an extension with the team that drafted him?

“I’m 100% confident; I think he loves [coach] Brad [Stevens],” opined Cornbread, as Maxwell is often called.

“I think he loves his teammates, and I think he’s just in a great situation that he’s become a marquee player. Would you want to all of a sudden say ‘Okay, I want to go play with Kyrie Irving in Brooklyn, and become that third?'” But then, I think that he’s in a unique situation, or he’s young. He’s the man on this team. He’s going to be the man on this team. And he’s playing with a great guy in [Jaylen] Brown that I think compliments him so well, and allows him to be who wants to be.”

“So yeah — I’m very confident that he stays,” added Maxwell.

Maxwell also has his eyes on a particular player Celtics fans still have fond memories of having on the roster that he thinks a reunion might be just what the team needs.

“If I had my crystal ball, and I could pick out one guy who really changed what this team has done — and I’m not sure if he’s under contract or not, so it’s not be tampering — but Aron Baynes would have been really a good roadblock in the paint and some toughness that sometimes I don’t think the Celtics really had.”

This team was a finesse team,” noted Cornbread, “and when it came down to power basketball, I think that’s when teams just really took them to the woodshed.”

Baynes is indeed a free agent this offseason, so if both parties wanted it to happen, a reunion wouldn’t be out of the question.

It would however likely entail a fairly substantial pay cut over what he might be able to earn with another team after an excellent season with the Phoenix Suns, scoring a career-high 11.5 points and 5.6 rebounds per game in his new home while hitting an also-career high 35.4% of his 3s on 4 attempts a game.

While there may not be a ton of cap space around the league, Baynes ought to be able to land at least the $6 million (estimated) Taxpayer Mid-level Exception Boston will likely be able to offer with the Suns and elsewhere, with more minutes for him to play than he’ll likely see with the Celtics.

But if it’s a ring and camaraderie he wants next season, Maxwell might just be on to something.

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All the Boston Celtics players who never lost an NBA Finals series

Mike Gorman unsure if Hayward stays long-term, wants scoring in draft

At the end of the 2019-20 Boston Celtics season, longtime play-by-play announcer Mike Gorman shared his thoughts on what the team should do in 2020-21.

Boston Celtics play-by-play announcer Mike Gorman recently appeared on the popular local sports radio show “Toucher and Rich” to talk what might be in store for Boston in their 2020-21 season.

The long-time Celtics announcer had some strong feelings about some aspects of Boston’s summer, but when it came to the biggest piece looming for the Celtics’ offseason plans, Gorman admitted he was as much in the dark as the rest of us.

That piece would be the future of Gordon Hayward’s contract, which has a player option on his final season. Should the Indiana native opt into it, he’ll be an unrestricted free agent at the end of of it, able to walk to the destination of his choosing.

“The big thing with Gordon is is his money,” noted the announcer. “He makes 30 something million this year [editor’s note: just over $34 million]; he’s got his choice to take it or walk away from it. So, maybe the idea of going to Indiana and be reunited with family maybe going back to Utah [appeals].”

This could be a reference to a loose framework of a deal that could see Hayward head to his home state franchise in exchange for a deal including one of both of the Indiana Pacers’ Victor Oladipo and/or Myles Turner.

Gorman also brought up the possibility of a deal sending Hayward back to the Utah Jazz.

“It’s true that Utah [also] might be interested in bringing back those possibilities, or maybe he just stays put and says, ‘Okay, the money is on the table — thank you very much,'” he added. “‘What time do we have practice?'”

The Celtics announcer seemed much more certain about what the Celtics need to address in the draft, however.

Second-unit coring and shooting — preferably lots of it, and of the sort that can help immediately.

“You’ve got to get somebody who can score off the bench,” he explained.

“Now, the Celtics have what? Three first-round draft picks? I know they’re like in the 20s, but they’ve got to find someone who can score off of the bench. They need a Lou Williams type of player. I don’t care if the kid never plays any defense, I want somebody to come in and shoot, shoot the ball and make baskets.”

“Someone who can come in and shoot threes, comes in and can score, take the ball to the basket,” Gorman emphasized.

With the Celtics reportedly interviewing prospects like Stanford’s Tyrell Terry and TCU’s Desmond Bane, it seems that area of improvement is on the menu for the team’s front office as well.

And as the team shifts into offseason concerns like the 2020 NBA Draft and free agency in the coming days and weeks, we may begin to get more signs of what team president Danny Ainge and company (and Hayward for that matter) are hoping to accomplish ahead of the 2020-21 NBA season.

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All the Boston Celtics players who never lost an NBA Finals series

Boston’s Ainge doesn’t regret standing pat at the trade deadline

Boston Celtics team president Danny Ainge shared he had no regrets not making a deal at the trade deadline in light of missing the Finals.

Watching a team that isn’t the Boston Celtics represent the Eastern Conference in the NBA Finals is never a joy for Celtics fans.

And when the opponent is the Los Angeles Lakers, it’s even worse for most.

Throw in the East team that advanced — in this case, the Miami Heat — getting stomped in Game 1 of the Finals, and it’s hard not to wonder if there was something more Boston could have done to make itself a more complete contender at the February trade deadline.

And in his end-of-season press conference, that exact question was posed to team president Danny Ainge, who pushed back at the question a bit.

“We tried,” he explained. “We tried to do some things at trade deadline, and we tried very hard. I don’t think it would be anything different.”

“It makes a fair assessment of our team that we weren’t as strong as we needed to be. I think that we had plenty of depth to get through these two Conference Finals, assuming that we don’t have Gordon [Hayward] and Kemba [Walker] banged up and Romeo Langford out.”

This seemed a bit generous on Ainge’s part, given that while Walker and Hayward’s health were undoubtedly a factor in limiting what the Celtics were able to accomplish in the postseason, Langford — despite his promising flashes — was not by any reasonable estimation.

“I don’t think we would have done anything different, but I think it’s a shame,” he added.

And it’s not clear there was much else to do, given you have to find a deal that makes sense at the deadline, and not just shuffle the deck for the appearance of activity.

“We didn’t make a strong effort to try to improve our team,” admitted the Celtics president, perhaps hinting their may have been a deal or two that would have required an otherwise-outrageous price that might have looked different had the landscape of the postseason been clearer.

“In hindsight, it’s a little bit different;” added Ainge.

“I think that had you [known you] were going to have a training camp in-between the trade deadline, and before the season, that’s probably a better question. If you knew you could bring someone in, have an entire training camp with them before they started started playoffs, [maybe things might have been different].”

Could this be a reference to the Heat, who clearly benefited greatly from having time to integrate big changes to their roster made at the trade deadline.

“I still think the answer would be the same,” observed Ainge. “There was a few guys we were chasing … that we were trying to add to a roster that can really help us.”

“We weren’t able to get those deals done,” he noted.

Boston’s plans for the offseason were a natural bridge in the exchanges, with several such questions fielded by the Celtics president.

“I won’t tell you specifics, but we’ve got some work to do, no question about it,” said Ainge. “And I’m not overreacting to a tough loss to a good opponent. I’m just saying that there’s some things we tried to do. We’d like to do in the at the trade deadline that we weren’t able to do and, and I think the things I’d like to do now this offseason to make our team better.”

“But we have a lot to do,” he added.

If they want to make the most of their talented young wings in Jaylen Brown and Jayson Tatum, we wholeheartedly agree.

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PHOTOS: Looking back on the Boston Celtics in the Disney restart bubble

WATCH: A year-long Boston Celtics season comes to an end

The 2019-20 Boston Celtics campaign was one for the history books in many ways.

362 days.

That’s how long this season went for the Boston Celtics; longer still if you consider the “Team Shamrock” contingent of Team USA — Marcus Smart, Kemba Walker, Jaylen Brown and Jayson Tatum — began playing together in China for the 2019 FIBA World Cup several weeks earlier.

Three days shy of a year, this team has officially played together as a team, a season that saw the meteoric ascent of Jayson Tatum, and the arrival of Jaylen Brown as a top-tier player.

A season which started with the loss of All-Stars Kyrie Irving and Al Horford, but quickly recovered with the additions of Kemba Walker and Enes Kanter — and seven rookies, including undrafted fan favorite Tacko Fall.

It had two All-Stars from Boston in Tatum and Walker (and if we’re being honest, it should have had three with Brown). It was a campaign like no other, with a four-month layover in the middle of the season due to an unprecedented pandemic.

There were nationwide protests for civil rights spilling into the single-site, Disney-hosted ‘bubble’ as part of the agreement to restart, and several Celtics using their platform while there to that end.

In a postseason that to date has yet to return a single positive COVID-19 case.

All in all, despite the unhappy ending for Boston, there is so much to look back on in one of the wildest rides of a Celtics season in their seven-decade history.

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Boston coach Brad Stevens has much to appreciate from Celtics’ season

While it’s very normal to look back at what went wrong after a season-ending loss, there’s a lot about this season’s Boston Celtics to appreciate.

In the NBA and in sports more generally, the tendency after a loss is to look at what went wrong, and when the loss ends the season, particularly so.

But after the Boston Celtics’ season ended with their Game 6 loss to the Miami Heat in the Eastern Conference Finals, Celtics head coach Brad Stevens fielded a refreshing question given the context of his postgame interview:

What did he appreciate about his team in this most unusual of seasons, bifurcated by the COVID-19 pandemic with a four-month pause and finished in a ‘bubble’ in the midst of considerable social unrest?

“I really appreciated the way that they played basketball year,” said Stevens. “I really appreciated the way that they competed.”

“I really appreciated the way they blocked out stuff that didn’t matter. I really appreciated the way that they inspired, with their voice while they were here. And before I appreciated the way that they empowered all the different NBA employees that work here, including Celtics employees and everybody else that benefited … from them putting everything they had into this, and then I appreciate the way that they played and found joy and stayed together.”

“We got one minor dust-up and it’s pretty good for a calendar year with a group,” he added, referring to the team’s Game 2 spat. “It’s pretty amazing when you think about it.”

This team sacrificed so much, from time with family and loved ones in one of the more fraught moments in modern memory.

Players sacrificed participating in causes that literally mean everything to them, as well as countless personal sacrifices, like Gordon Hayward playing through injury and the birth of his child.

There is plenty of blame to go around regarding why this team is headed to their respective homes and not the NBA Finals.

But in the greater context of what they accomplished with their platforms, and with their professionalism — to say nothing of this team shattering expectations after losing Kyrie Irving and Al Horford — there is so much to appreciate about this team, and their 2019-20 season.

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PHOTOS: Looking back on the Boston Celtics in the Disney restart bubble

WATCH: for the Celtics, the fight continues no matter Game 5’s outcome

No matter the outcome of Game 5, the fight the Boston Celtics took up this summer will continue.

The Boston Celtics are on a mission bigger than basketball, and no matter how the game goes tonight, or when the season ends, that mission will continue unabated into the future.

The team has put it all on the line for a chance at a title, but also for a chance to extend and amplify their platform in service of a greater good.

That service is to ensure that Black Lives Matter, and that we arrive at equity socially as fast as we are able.

It’s to ensure that all the Breonna Taylors of our countries (we see you, Canada!) have a chance at justice, whether or not we ever hear their name.

But more than anything, they are committed to building a better world with the rest of us, and that struggle will continue as long as we fight with them.

There is so much to be proud of in this season, but the struggle still lies ahead. Steel yourself for the push across the finish line — not just today, this series or this playoffs, but in November on Election Day, and every day going forward.

Good luck tonight, Boston — we’ve got your back.

We know how much you have ours.

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FiveThirtyEight: Cs most-likely in East for Finals, in NBA to win title

The data wizards at FiveThirtyEight just gave the Boston Celtics’ end-of-season outlook a MAJOR upgrade after they dispatched the Toronto Raptors.

The Boston Celtics surged to the top of FiveThirtyEight’s 2019-20 NBA Predictions after their 92 – 87 Game 7 win over the Toronto Raptors in the Eastern Conference Semifinals on Friday.

Garnering pole positions in the estimation of the data wizards running the ironically-named RAPTOR-based projection, the Celtics are now deemed to have a 75% chance of getting past their opponents of the East Finals — the Miami Heat — to get to the 2020 NBA Finals.

Perhaps even more intriguing, Boston is expected to have a 54% chance of hanging Banner 18 this October.

The Celtics’ next-nearest opponent in the title race is the Los Angeles Clippers, given a 19% shot at winning it all, followed by the Miami Heat with 12%, and, shockingly, the Los Angeles Lakers with just 8% odds of a title.

The nearly-eliminated Denver Nuggets are expected to have less than 1% odds of a championship this season, which makes sense given their current position in their Western Conference Semifinals series.

The Celtics’ split regular-season record with the Heat would perhaps inspire confidence in some, but for the data-crunchers at FiveThirtyEight, a 25% shot at getting past Boston is the assessment, and based on the star power and matchup, it’s probably as good a guess as any.

But the Celtics ought to approach this series as if that number were reversed, lest their confidence end up backfiring with less-than-desperate play.

Just ask Giannis Antetokounmpo and the Milwaukee Bucks their opinion of Jimmy Butler’s new team.

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WATCH: Celtics players surprised with family messages ahead of Game 7

If this doesn’t move your heart a little, check your pulse — you might not have one if it doesn’t.

The Boston Celtics found themselves the recipients of a most welcome surprise ahead of their Game 7 showdown with the Toronto Raptors this Friday night.

Isolated from the rest of the world in the Disney restart bubble — including from family, friends and loved ones — the Celtics have only had each other to power themselves through the highs and lows of a grueling NBA postseason.

At least up until now, anyway.

Today, the team got some much-needed support from wherever the heart considers home as their loved ones provided some surprise messages of support over the pivotal win or go home contest.

Whether they win or lose tonight’s tilt with the league’s defending champions, they have earned the respect and support of their fans with the Ubuntu-like brotherhood they built from the ashes of disaster.

As head coach Brad Stevens is fond of saying, let the chips fall where they may — just know you have the support of countless fans no matter what the score when the final buzzer sounds.

Particularly their No. 1 fans, who matter most.

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