Finding Meaning in a Lost Season
With their championship window temporarily closed, what’s in it for the C’s, and for us?
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In the interest of marking opening night of the 2025-26 Celtics season with a bold prediction, I’m prepared to make the following call: The C’s will not be winning a championship this year. There will be no hanging of Banner 19, no Duck Boat Parade, no confetti dropping on center court. This is not the season for those kinds of hopes and dreams.
If you want to be completely cynical about the state of the Celtics, it’s not even a season with any larger relevancy whatsoever. Given the lack of legitimate championship aspirations and their complicated tax situation, the cynic says they should sell off some assets, sit the stars with phantom injuries, load up the tank, and hope to get lucky in the lottery.
Somewhere between the poles of extreme NBA optimism and nihilism lies a more realistic path for the Celtics to take this season. It’s one filled with less significant milestones than years past, but still has the potential to offer a rewarding journey from late fall to early spring.
Maybe the veterans reach new heights. Maybe the young guys take a positive step forward. Maybe the Celtics win more games than they lose and dust off some of that fabled mystique during the playoffs. Or perhaps, this will be a long year filled with too many moments of mediocrity to be memorable. Perhaps the vets are what they are. Perhaps the kids just aren’t that good, after all.
In a league filled with certainty and inevitability, the 2025-26 Celtics offer a collection of maybes and perhaps. To be sure, they’re operating under a narrow band of expectations when a successful season results in a top-6 playoff berth, while an inconsistent one leads to the play-in route. We’re not talking about a wide range of realistic possibilities here.
It’s within that finite spectrum between better than you think and worse than you expect that the Celtics fan needs to find meaning. Whether it’s an overtime win against a longtime rival, or a deep bench player giving you 12-and-8 on a cold night in January, the reasons to tune in and care about a .500 basketball team have to come from within your own construct.
Lord knows the league’s hype machine is greeting this upcoming Celtics season with a collective shrug. Barring a complete collapse, the 2025-26 Cs will be one of many NBA teams stuck in the unforgiving marrow of the nebulous middle. Their existence as a non contender fighting for postseason scraps won’t lead the national talk shows, and it certainly won’t make much of a dent locally between Patriots and Red Sox seasons.
Maybe that’s not such a bad thing after all these years in the spotlight. Perhaps that lack of external expectations makes this season more intriguing for the longtime observer. Maybe even kind of, dare I say, fun. What’s the worst that can happen? More key players get injured, they bottom out, Brad Stevens blows up the roster to get under the tax, and a prime draft asset gets deposited into the vault. (Maybe the cynics have a point, after all.)
Yet, if we are sure of anything – other than not winning a championship this season – it’s that the Celtics will compete night in and night out. They may not win as much as they once did, but they will play their collective asses off or Joe Mazzulla will play someone else.
The essential lesson of the preseason is that Coach Joe has no interest in going quietly into that good night. Whether it’s rapid lineup changes, full court defenses, or 12-man rotations, Mazzulla has made it known that he intends to get after it every single night with whatever he has on his bench. If that level of effort doesn’t get you excited as a basketball fan, what will?
There are other reasons to watch beyond wins and losses. From Jaylen Brown’s fit atop the franchise hierarchy to Derrick White’s ability to level up into a legitimate secondary star, every single player on the roster has something to prove.
Name me a player and we can talk about their career arriving at a metaphorical crossroads this season. Can Payton Pritchard handle 80 games as a starting guard? Can Hugo Gonzalez contribute to the rotation? We can go up and down the roster and find something to critique, analyze, and appreciate.
For many of the players, this year represents the best chance they will ever have at constructing an identity as an NBA player. Some of them may stick around for the next iteration of Celtics’ basketball. Many will not. That’s the nature of this sport. Here today, gone tomorrow. Hopefully, we can both appreciate each other’s company in the time we have together.
Because of that dynamic, some people have pegged this as a gap year. Others have labeled it a transition year or a bridge year. Choose your own verbiage, the one thing all these adjectives have in common is the implicit understanding that this year doesn’t mean that much in the grand scheme of things.
Presumably, that grand scheme involves an intricate plan revolving around Tatum’s ability to return to the court. The most important variable is that he is able to continue being Jayson Tatum once he does. All respect to Brown and White, if Tatum’s not a top-7 player following his Achilles rehab, then the C’s have far different considerations than we realize.
The start of the season is no time for undue pessimism. Let us assume that Tatum is progressing on a reasonable timeline, and let us further assume that he will continue being one of the league’s best players when is able to return to the lineup. We can’t assume Tatum won’t take the court before the end of this season, but we can all hope that his return isn’t dictated by anything other than a clean bill of health.
Viewed through that wider lens, the 2025-26 season is something of a freebie for Stevens and the front office. They have a full year to make evaluations, tighten up the finances, and hopefully flesh out a roster that will allow them to compete for championships again sooner rather than later. For everyone else— be they coaches, players, fans, and interested observers — this season is about appreciating who the Celtics are in this moment, not lamenting what they once were.