Time off before a championship has its perks and its drawbacks for both a team and its fans.
The plus side for teams is that it offers some needed rest, recuperation time for an injury (see the soleus of Kristaps Porzingis, which is not the name of a work of art, by the way), making travel plans for family and friends looking to attend, and getting your mind right for the grind and intensity to come in pursuit of a title.
For fans? You can take a mental health break from the intensity conference finals bring, restock the beer fridge, drink some water, maybe have another water, relax, attend to real life maters that you’ve been putting off while centering your calendar around sports viewing and prepare for the rush that will be watching your beloved team make one final go at a championship. Don’t make parade route plans just yet; that comes across as overconfident.
However, there are drawbacks, like a team getting rusty or falling out of rhythm, but the positives far outweigh the negatives in this case, as many athletes would tell you.
The biggest drawback has unfortunately become the media needing to fill all that time between conference finals and championships with, well, stuff. The need to tell stories and put forth unnecessary analysis and even perhaps fudge storylines and create drama where it doesn’t exist so as to prevent viewer disinterest and goose ratings before what matters most is broadcast.
We all well remember how interminable the waits between AFC title game and Super Bowl were in the Brady-Belichick years (though the team was in “The Big Game” so often you’d have thought team and fans alike were pros at mastering the time in-between). We’d read headlines or hear stories of locker room drama or off-field issues that, whether they existed or not, didn’t matter to fans, for we were taught to “ignore the noise.”
And now for the Celtics, conference final regulars for the better part of the last decade, appearing in their second NBA Finals in three years, the biggest concern during their time off? Brushing off the media’s latest effort at dividing Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown.
The biggest culprit, believe it or not, has not been the Boston media but rather a broadcast partner of the NBA: ESPN. (Let’s not get going on a regionally perceived bias of ESPN towards Boston sports, Mort’s tweet and all, please.)
Witness these head scratchers from ESPN’s morning show, “Get Up”, this week. First an idea that Tatum didn’t celebrate Brown’s Eastern Conference Finals MVP enough because he was disappointed he didn’t win.
As you can see, Celtics forward Oshae Brissett jumped all over it, accusing the show of being bored and synthesizing drama (the universal response to this proposition has been overwhelmingly negative). Even Jeff Goodman, a basketball analyst and frequent guest of WEEI who once said on the station’s airwaves that Brown and Tatum weren’t exactly besties, said Tatum seemed plenty happy for his teammate, who’s been scrutinized heavily this offseason. Mostly thanks to Stephen A. Smith saying league sources have told him Brown’s attitude and demeanor make him unmarketable.
The Ringer’s Bill Simmons, a noted Celtics supporter, you can say, surfaced a clip from his podcast circa the All-Star Break where a league source told him Tatum wanted to cede minutes in an effort to help Brown get the All-Star Game MVP.
Does that sound like something that someone who doesn’t like his teammate would do?
And then another segment from “Get Up” that drew a clapback from a member of the Celtics, this time 2008 NBA champion Leon Powe, who’s had enough of the media madness aimed at disrupting the Celtics chemistry.
The talent of Brown and Tatum paired together, perhaps mixed with their inability to deliver a title thus far, despite more Eastern Conference Finals appearances together than almost one third of the NBA’s franchises, has put a bullseye on their collective back. It seems, though, that there’s almost been an agenda toward the Celtics fortunately pairing these two talents together, right around the end of the Brady-Belichick era no less, that created a jealousy or dislike that is inexplicable. Or so some former players believe.
You’ve got local media seemingly never giving the team credit (and sometimes getting called out for it by national media) on top of it all as well. We had to imagine Boston’s dynamic duo would face perhaps their heaviest scrutiny to date, especially with the narrative floating that the Celtics’ run to the Finals has been so easy thanks to star player injury after injury, from Jimmy Butler of Miami all the way to Tyrese Haliburton of Indiana.
The constant deluge of disbelief is, much like an 82-game season and four rounds of postseason basketball, exhausting. And the time off only amplifies a narrative that has gained a life of its own. A narrative that exists even in the face of the players’ own words and actions contradicting it completely.
People are often as consumed with tearing something down as they are willing it to succeed. Maybe it’s just human nature. And we get it. This is a long break between the conference finals and NBA Finals. Networks need viewers, podcasts need downloads, and headlines need clicks. Whether you root for, cover or don’t care about these Celtics, you have to admit that trying to create tension where it doesn’t exist has truly become laughable at this point.
Efforts to divide Boston’s two best players, who each had an excellent series against the Pacers, may only unite them in a strengthened effort to finally hoist a championship trophy, raise banner 18 in the Garden, and show up their detractors. The fans seem galvanized by it. Their teammates are behind them. Hopefully a Finals win, which would bring all of Celtics-kind together, will hush up everyone trying to tear them apart.
Or maybe not. Chances are everyone wearing or rooting for the green will be too busy celebrating to notice.