“In the morning, there was a big wind blowing and the waves were running high up on the beach and he was awake a long time before he remembered that his heart was broken.”
The words are Hemingway’s.
I was woken up, as I usually am, by Clara the cat, whose business is to inform me when the rest of the cats are ready for breakfast. The time, 5:30, was not particularly unusual either.
I woke up with a sense of something lost, something gone irretrievably, and I knew immediately what it was. I was not awake a long time before I remembered that the Celtics’ season had ended on Saturday night.
I used to live in the middle of Sioux Falls, where I could hear the old courthouse clock toll the hours, and there was no silence quite like the silence that came after the final bell tolled—it was not the silence of silence, it was the silence of absence, something missing that had been there a moment ago.
And so it goes with the Celtics. The 2025/2026 Celtics are gone. There may be small roster changes over the summer or there may be major ones.
But one thing is certain: the team that was is gone.
This happens to every team, and of the sixteen teams that make the playoffs, only one will end the season a champion. For every other team, there comes a moment like the one on Saturday night where it all ends, and where it leaves a hole.
As fans, we kind of get used to this, to a certain extent. We know there’s always a next year—but when the end comes the way it came to this year’s Celtics, it’s hard.
It’s hard not just because Boston put up a 3-1 lead, it’s because of the way they put together that 3-1 lead. They blew out the Sixers twice and won a third time in a closely matched game. There was no reason to expect that the Sixers could win three straight against a team that had blown them out twice, and yet…
Much as we would like them to be, games are not stories. The narratives that fit best are fitted in hindsight. No team in the NCAA tournament is a Cinderella until they’ve won a game they shouldn’t have.
The danger of making narratives in advance was apparent by December, when the Celtics were demonstrating that, at least as far as the regular season went, this was not going to be a gap year.
When Tatum came back, there seemed to be even more validity to the idea that this was a storybook season.
And what we got was a version of Cinderella that went like this: “Cinderella lost her shoe on the way out of the ball. The Prince, although stricken by her beauty, figured that he had no chance of finding her by searching the kingdom, so he got on with his life. Eventually he forgot all about her.”
In other words, the end of the season felt premature, abrupt, and cruel.
But that’s how it feels to us as Celtics fans. On the other side of the court, there’s a different storybook unfolding. Sixers fans who could claim that legitimately, with Embiid’s limited availability and Paul George’s league mandated vacation, they had not been at full strength during the regular season either, now get to savor their own Cinderella story. Perhaps their story will end as abruptly as Boston’s did, perhaps it will linger on as far as the Eastern Conference Finals; it seems unlikely to last much farther.
Trying to tell stories before they unfold, setting expectations that are not matched, is dangerous unless you’re prepared to accept not only the hollow pit of losing, but the added chagrin of having ‘gotten it wrong.’
Were we fooled into expecting more from the Celtics than they were capable of delivering?
I mean, the results are the results, and the reality is that you are what your record says you are, but it feels like Boston left behind unfinished business this season.
Predictably, there have been calls for drastic changes—the notion that Jaylen Brown should be traded has once again surfaced, and there have been calls for a review of Joe Mazzulla’s chops as a coach.
This is not unexpected. And it strikes me as a bit of an overreaction.
It’s tempting to focus on the fact that the C’s lost three straight against Philly, without remembering that Boston finished the series +19 in points scored.
Is this evidence of bad coaching and bad play on the part of the Celtics, over the last three games?
You better believe it is. It’s the fault of the Celtics coaching staff and players that they couldn’t adapt to the return of Embiid.
Does this mean that the only sensible, sane, and reasonable reaction is to make major personnel changes and fire the coach?
No. Not even remotely.
In 1978, Dennis Johnson had a terrible Finals performance. In Game 7, he went 0-14, as the Sonics lost to the Bullets.
The following year, in a Finals rematch, DJ redeemed himself; his shooting percentage jumped from .382 in 1978 to .459 in 1979, and he won the Finals MVP in a series that was over in just five games.
Now I’m not saying that there are guys who came up small in this series who are as good as DJ was. I’m saying that DJ, in just his second year in the league, caught a serious case of the yips, but the Sonics stuck with him, and he redeemed himself—against the same basic team that he choked against the year before.
I think there are young guys on the Celtics who, given a second chance, will surprise us.
Yes, you only get so many bites at the apple—playing careers do not last forever, and finishing a season this way basically wastes a year of Jaylen’s prime, but that year is gone now. No amount of rash actions over the summer will get that year back.
My response to the season is that patience should carry the day. There will probably need to be some personnel tweaks over the summer, but nothing major is warranted, in my opinion. I think this is a time to trust the coaching staff and players to respond the right way to what went wrong against Philadelphia.
There will be better times to come.
