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Moore: Celtics bounced, enter big offseason
- Updated: April 29, 2016
The Boston Celtics’ season came to end with a loss to the Atlanta Hawks Thursday night, and a big offseason awaits. Quickly, let;s reflect on the year that was and what Boston can do to not be at such a talent deficit come next season.
Coming into this season, the Celtics were the darling of the purely quantitative predictions, which pegged them for 50 or more wins. Analysts were far more skeptical. Boston landed in the middle. They weren’t a top team in the league, even when they flirted with a top-two seed early on, but they were a consistently competitive team, even against the league’s elite. They were smart and tough, total hustle junkies. They poured their effort out every night, and found ways to win with an underwhelming arsenal.
At times they looked like they could hang with anyone. In two matchups with the Warriors, Boston beat the champs and took them to double overtime. They also hung right with the Cavaliers and generally battled admirably against top teams.
But they never felt on that same level, and eventually settled into a fairly mediocre team, as a first-round bounce would sufficiently indicate. There was some hope that the Celtics could make a playoff run after they won Games 3 and 4 against Atlanta to even the series. Given the mythical nature of Brad Stevens’ coaching, there was a belief that the whole could continue being greater than the sum of Boston’s parts.
Not so much.
The Celtics took those two games from Atlanta behind monstrous efforts from Isaiah Thomas and outlier performances from Marcus Smart and Evan Turner, but in the end, the Hawks’ superior talent won out. That was the distressing result of their first-round loss. They weren’t outcoached or outworked. Boston lost because it wasn’t inherently good enough from a player perspective. The idea that Brad Stevens’ coaching would be enough to counteract a talent deficiency in a seven-game series was flawed from the beginning, but on top of that, the Hawks were able to make …
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