Celtics’ Brad Stevens still reconciling how season that had sudden title hopes ended so quickly

BOSTON (AP) — Make no mistake about it, Brad Stevens still expected to be watching the Celtics in the playoffs right now.

“I’m pissed. I’d rather be playing New York tonight,” Boston’s president of basketball operations said Wednesday during his end of season news conference.

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Stevens’ bitterness is not just about the second-seeded Celtics losing to Philadelphia to mark the third time in the last four years that they have lost in the playoffs as the higher seed.

It’s more about how a team that started the season with Jayson Tatum sidelined, and with such low outside expectations, overachieved to a point that Stevens and the front office were thinking anything was possible when the postseason opened a few weeks ago.

“If you would have told me last summer that we would have won 56 games in the regular season; that the young guys would all become contributors; that people would have great impacts, and all up and down our roster; that we would get Tatum back for (22 games) … I would have been thrilled with those results,” Stevens said. “But the reality is, is that we came up short and, so now the job is to do an honest assessment.”

Stevens said that introspection will begin with first taking a breath following Boston’s earliest postseason exit since Stevens’ final season as Boston’s coach in 2020-2021.

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It got him thinking about a small sign that hangs in his office that says, “What do you want, what’s true and how do you get there.”

“There’s no question what we want. There’s no question when you look at what’s true that, though we did a lot of good things, we lost in the first round,” Stevens said. “And we’re also 3-11 against the top three seeds in the West (Oklahoma City, San Antonio, Denver) and the other top two (Detroit, New York) in the East. And so, we’ve got to get better.”

Even before Tatum made his season debut on March 6, just shy of 10 months after rupturing his right Achilles tendon in the second round of the playoffs last season against New York, the Celtics were thriving with the feisty group led by All-Star Jaylen Brown.

Brown set…

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/celtics-brad-stevens-still-reconciling-195835512.html

Author : KYLE HIGHTOWER

Publish date : 2026-05-06 19:58:00

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