Boston’s season came to a screeching halt with a meek performance in Thursday night’s Game 6 at TD Garden (almost 14 years to the day of their clinching victory in 2008), with the visiting Warriors, led by Finals MVP Stephen Curry, celebrating another title on the Celtics’ home floor. It made sense. The Warriors, molded from years of playing on basketball’s biggest stage, were the better team, more poised, more resilient. And they had an edge, playing with a chip on their shoulder after, as Curry articulated in his post-game interview with Lisa Salters, “hitting rock bottom” with the league’s worst record in 2020 (15-50).
The headstrong Celtics, meanwhile, were young and brash, digging huge holes for themselves with head-scratching turnovers (22 of them in Thursday’s defeat) and a maddening penchant for abandoning what worked earlier, forging a new identity on the fly. These growing pains are to be expected of a team with such a significant experience gap to overcome (not that the Celtics haven’t been a perennial playoff team with their current core of Jayson Tatum, Jaylen Brown, Marcus Smart and Al Horford). The glass half-full crowd will frame this as a learning experience, an embarrassing setback the Celtics can grow from as Tatum and Brown evolve into more complete players capable of winning a championship. Tatum (24) and Brown (25) are babies after all, hoops novices still scratching the surface of their Hall-of-Fame potential.
It’s a convenient excuse for a team that, after surging to a 2-1 series lead, evaporated before our eyes, no-showing in Games 4-6 with their supposed best player unraveling in a disaster of his own making. The biggest criticism of Tatum, besides his poor shooting (36.2 percent for the series) and inexplicable carelessness, committing a record 100 postseason turnovers, was how tentative he looked in big moments, shrinking when the Celtics needed him most. Fair or not, Tatum will have to wear this one, owning his role in what many would consider a missed opportunity. Needless to say, the All-Star forward should probably stay off social media for a few days.
Bad as Tatum looked in the Finals, leaking confidence as the Warriors (captained by the Dennis Rodman of his generation, Draymond Green) seized on his insecurities, the All-Star’s sudden and unfortunately timed disappearing act could be boiled down to one not insignificant factor—complete and utter exhaustion. Throw in a nagging shoulder injury, the severity of which remains a mystery, and it’s easy to see how Tatum could be compromised, limping to the finish line after a taxing playoffs, a chaotic regular season and, when he was supposed to be catching his breath, representing Team USA at the Tokyo Olympics last summer.
Whether Tatum was running on fumes, outmatched by a superior opponent or merely picked the worst time possible to fall into his old bad habits, the 24-year-old’s story is still being written. He’ll take his lumps and move on, just as LeBron James did early in his career in Cleveland. Even Michael Jordan, who many forget didn’t win a title until his age-28 season, encountered roadblocks along his path to greatness. Until Jordan’s breakthrough in 1991, the “Bad Boy” Pistons were a consistent thorn in his side. For now, Tatum will just have to weather the storm, using his nightmare series against the Warriors as motivation to come back a better, hungrier version of himself in 2022-23.
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