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Watching the Knicks punch their ticket to the NBA Finals has, in my opinion, sucked.
Yes, they’ve waited 27 years to return to this stage, endured truly awful stretches of basketball spanning decades, and maybe deserve it on some level. Still, it’s New York. It’s Knicks fans. It’s “bing bong” and Timothée Chalamet clips that will infiltrate your timelines for the next two weeks.
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But spending this much time looking at the Knicks has made me appreciate how different Boston’s story has been.
The Knicks built their team from the outside in. They deserve…credit for it, as physically painful as that sentence is to type. They made trades, found the right veterans, identified the right fits, bet big on a team identity, and kept pushing until they finally broke through.
Boston’s path has looked very different.
The Celtics’ best era since the Big Three started with two draft cards.
Jaylen Brown, third overall in 2016. Jayson Tatum, third overall in 2017. Two swings near the top of the draft, both connected cleanly enough to change the next decade of Celtics basketball.
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It’s a story we’re all familiar with, and one that feels simple and obvious in retrospect. It wasn’t. Brown was booed on Draft Night. Tatum arrived after Boston traded out of the No. 1 pick and trusted its board, going as far as to preemptively protect themselves from criticism for doing so. There were years of debates about whether they could play together, whether they liked each other enough, whether one had to go, whether the partnership had a ceiling, whether the Celtics were being too patient or not patient enough.
Then, they won the title.
And somehow, two years later, we’re back to asking whether the Jays era has underachieved.
The standard is still the standard
The Celtics are and should be held to a ridiculous standard. That’s part of the deal here in Boston.
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This franchise is strictly focused on banners, not vibes, which is why a first-round exit after blowing a 3-1 lead to Philadelphia was and is awful. It should still bother people. I know it still bothers me.
Noa Dalzell, Senior…
Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/tatum-brown-made-celtics-fans-111200947.html
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Publish date : 2026-05-28 11:12:00
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