An emotional Derrick White sat in full uniform, a towel draped around his neck, his head buried in his hands.
A few lockers down, Payton Pritchard stared blankly into his stall. Sam Hauser tapped him on his way out, offering a somber dap before exiting the room.
Moments later, Pritchard stood up, took a deep breath, and walked into a cluster of reporters.
“It’s disappointing,” he said drearily. “Very disappointing. Just being up 3-1 and then end up losing the series.”
That feeling hung heavy in a locker room that had been so vibrant all season long.
“It sucks,” White said, looking down at the floor. “You always think you are going to play for a long time, and it kind of ends so quickly.”
There are plenty of places to point.
Jayson Tatum being ruled out just hours before tipoff. The 1-of-12 shooting over the final five minutes, including 10 straight misses to close it out. A starting lineup featuring three players making their first career postseason starts in a Game 7 — Luka Garza, Baylor Scheierman, and Ron Harper Jr. — combining for zero points, making the Celtics the first team since 1970-71 to have three scoreless starters in a playoff game. Jordan Walsh and Hugo Gonzalez were also held scoreless.
You could also point to Philadelphia’s hot shooting. Or the Celtics’ inability to make shots.
Take your pick.
The Celtics shouldn’t have been in that position to begin with. With a 13-point lead in the third quarter of Game 5, it looked like they were on their way to a fifth straight trip to the second round. Instead, they land on the wrong side of history, becoming the first team in franchise history to blow a 3-1 series lead (previously 32-0).
“It was a great season. I’m proud of my teammates and just their growth. Guys coming from different organizations, or guys who haven’t really played a lot, stepped up big in these playoffs and stepped up big in the regular season to help us get to the position we are at,” Jaylen Brown said. “I’m so grateful to be with this group. This group is awesome. I had a fun year. This is probably one of my most fun years playing basketball. It wasn’t always perfect. It wasn’t always analytically or aesthetically pleasing. But we won a lot of basketball games, and people could see the grit and the fight that we played with every single night. Tonight was an example of that. We left it all out there.”
Both things can be true.
Yes, a 56-win season exceeded expectations after trading away Jrue Holiday and Kristaps Porzingis, losing Al Horford and Luke Kornet in free agency, and navigating the first 62 games without Tatum. And yes, the development across the roster was real and encouraging.
But there’s no escaping this: blowing a 3-1 series lead and losing a Game 7 at home — where teams were historically 115-40 — is a failure.
Before Saturday night, 301 teams had taken a 3-1 lead. Only 14 had lost the series. Now, the Celtics are part of that woeful group, dropping three at TD Garden in the process.
The last time they lost three consecutive games was the opening week of the season, six months ago, when simply being competitive in a first-round series might have been framed as success.
But expectations changed.
They changed as the growth Brown and others praised postgame took hold. As Joe Mazzulla, Brown, and the rest of the remaining 2024 championship core proved they could prevent a significant drop-off. As Tatum returned from his Achilles injury looking like himself again. And, of course, as the Celtics secured the No. 2 seed in the Eastern Conference, the conference they were favored to win.
They played their way out of “gap year” territory and into contention, a level they looked every bit capable of reaching in 32-point wins in Games 1 and 4, only to fall apart when it mattered most. In doing so, they also became just the second team in NBA history to lose a playoff series despite multiple 30-point wins.
Maybe this team wasn’t a true title contender. Perhaps a roster built with an eye on the future — shedding salary, getting out of the second apron, and ducking the luxury tax — simply wasn’t capable of sustaining its regular-season success, ultimately landing exactly where many expected it to.
But they were better than what they showed in the second half of Game 5. And certainly better than the no-show in Game 6 that put them in this position in the first place.
Now, after another disappointing postseason exit, the Celtics enter an offseason with plenty to figure out, one arriving on the second day of May, a time of year they’ve grown accustomed to playing deep into.
