And so we sit here at one.
One, as in the total number of championships the Celtics have won since Ronald Reagan was President, the space shuttle Challenger blew up and gas was $.89 a gallon.
By the way, in 1986 you could buy a Plymouth Colt for $4,999. I don’t believe I’ve ever heard of a Plymouth Colt, but I imagine it was a rival of the legendary Ford Pinto.
After that Game 6 performance, those are the kind of cars Jayson Tatum and pals deserve to drive around for a while.
Despite having a 2-1 series lead, Boston still managed to lose three straight, including two at home. One of those losses was the deciding Game 6 when the C’s had their butts and egos handed to them courtesy of Steph Curry.
Curry is the best player on the planet without debate. In Game 4 in Boston he exploded, much like the Chernobyl nuclear plant did in 1986. Curry hung 43 points on the C’s. That’s hard to overcome.
Sure, Larry Bird and the Celtics overcame huge games from Michael Jordan in the mid ’80s and still won the series, but as we have established, that was a long time ago.
The 2022 Celtics pretty much stunk at home in the postseason. The C’s were just 6-6 through the entire playoffs at the Garden.
I thought about getting a ticket to go see a game. Glad I didn’t.
The NBA Finals seemed too big and bright to most of the Celtics. Maybe not Al Horford, who stepped up in Games 1 and 6 in a big way. But did Jayson Tatum ever score a point in the final five minutes of any of the games? At one point literally he had not.
I think in fairness to Tatum, he’s exhausted. It’s a mega long season. He played a lot of minutes. And we may find out that he’s got a nagging injury somewhere as well.
These are excuses. And when you’re just two wins from a title, good teams and great players find a way to overcome. This group did not. But I will say the future looks bright.
Obviously the core of this team, including the two stars, are very young. I saw on Twitter (so it must be true) that neither Steph Curry nor LeBron James won championships until they were older than both Tatum and Brown. So the best days for these guys and this team are probably ahead of us.
Heck, I’d gladly go back to writing on a 1986 Tandy 600 portable computer if it helped today’s Celtics return to some of the frequent glory of that time.
