NBA Season Preview 2017-18: The Celtics are breaking new ground

Nobody’s had a weirder last two years than the Boston Celtics. Maybe ever. Not a whole lot of teams out there have both won their conference and had the No. 1 overall pick in the modern era. Not many could have had that happen and still be just as much of a championship threat as we all figured they were — which is to say not at all. Maybe if Isaiah Thomas was healthy, things would have been different. I believe they would have finished off the Washington Wizards with a little more aplomb. But it’s hard to believe they would have done much better against Cleveland than they did, losing four games out of five by an average of 25.75 points.

Then, not many teams would have responded to that Conference Finals berth, a major improvement on 2015’s fifth-place in the East and first-round exit, by trading the guy whose improvement was the major reason they got there. And, incidentally, not many people could have done that while holding future first round picks from the Lakers, the Clippers, the Grizzlies, or from either Philly or Sacramento all before 2020.

Most of all, though, not many teams would have done it because the extreme realities of life in the NBA in 2017 makes all of these things totally logical. Danny Ainge, perhaps more than anybody else in the league, understands the super team era. He kind of invented it, putting together Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce, and Ray Allen in 2007, and in the process discovering that great players who had never won a ring were particularly susceptible to making sacrifices to create better teams. You would think, or one would think, that any year, any time, winning the Eastern Conference would mean something. And you would be wrong.

The East, as it has been most of the last fifteen years, is extremely weak across the board, and barring injuries — barring, probably, at least two major injuries each — nobody besides the Cavs or Warriors has had a shot really either of the last two years. No matter how good they were, or how well set up. So, running back a team that did really well but didn’t threaten the Cavs in the playoffs was a sucker’s bet, and Ainge knew it was a sucker’s bet. So he did other stuff instead.

The 2017-18 Boston Celtics differ from the 2016-2017 Celtics more than any two really good teams for the same franchise, in consecutive years, have differed that I can think of or come close to thinking of. Instead of franchise hero IT at point, they’ll have Finals hero Kyrie Irving. Instead of defensive stalwart Jae Crowder, on the wing, they’ll have All-Star Gordon Hayward. Instead of Avery Bradley, they’ll have — well they’ll have options. They’ve added to last years’ bench mob, which included Kelly Olynyk, Jaylen Brown, Terry Rozier, and Jonas Jerebko, second overall pick Jayson Tatum while losing only Olynyk. They’ll probably be playing, at least in small increments, mystery big man Guerschon Yabusele. In short, between Tatum, 2016’s third overall pick Brown, Yabusele and others they have the potential to have an extraordinary young core, while Irving, Horford, and Hayward give them a starting rotation that few will be able to match.

It almost certainly won’t be enough, at least with respect to winning a championship. Time will tell how the new Cs stack up with the Cavs, now that they’ve swapped point guards, but nobody’s going to be good as the Warriors, again. It took a better Cavs team than the one they have now seven games and overtime to beat a Warriors team that didn’t yet have Kevin Durant –- no small addition — and hadn’t added a bunch of free-range 3-point shooters that nobody’ll have time to guard in the form of players like Omri Casspi and Nick Young. But it certainly has become more likely that the Cs come out of the East, and if anything was capable of making the NBA competitive, what we see here might come close to doing the trick.

And again, the important thing for the Cs is that they’ve positioned themselves to get even better over the course of the next few years. Tatum and Brown may take strides in that period, and none of their stars are old. Al Horford, the old man of the core at 31 years old may not have done for Boston as much as he did for Atlanta, but his role is different, and his game is very capable of adapting to the new realities. Gordon Hayward is 27 and just made his first All-Star game, while having an extraordinarily well-rounded season for a forward. Irving is still just 25, but with more playoff experience that most guys get in a career.

So, the Celtics will be tough this year, but they’ll be tougher next year and likely tougher the year after that. In three years, when 22-year-old Tatum and 23-year-old Brown are playing with 30-year-old Hayward and 28-year old Kyrie — presuming that all comes to pass — who knows how good they can be? And who knows how well they might yet draft with all the picks they have coming?

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For now, in 2017-18, they may well lead the Eastern Conference in wins again, and it may be a more honest picture of how they stack up to the best than in the season just passed. They may well be as good as the Cavs, and certainly they’ll be more competitive against the best West teams. Like many teams with a lot of new parts, they may need a little time to gel, but if that happens, they’ll be all the more dangerous come playoff time. If they still probably don’t have a chance, without a miracle, against the Warriors in the Finals, well, that could be said, at this point, about even most computer-generated all-time teams. They’ve done as good a job as anyone could reasonably expect to do, building for both the present and the future, and I look forward to seeing how it plays out.