The Boston Celtics Are Going For It

The Boston Celtics are trying to make the playoffs for the sake of doing it. There is nothing grand about this, or if there is, it's a small grandness, like cooking a meal for one's family. The Eastern Conference is wide open in the least appealing possible sense, and the Celtics have found themselves, seemingly by accident, just a half-game back of the Brooklyn Nets for the eighth seed. And so Brad Stevens and his crew of rotation players have decided to fight, hard, for the privilege of getting annihilated by the Atlanta Hawks in a couple weeks.

We're in early April, the belly of the sleepiest part of the NBA season, when the league has long since stratified and entered energy-saver mode. The best teams are in a holding pattern, resting stars and keeping themselves just warm enough so they don't pull a literal or metaphorical quad in their first round series; the worst teams somehow seem even worse. Everyone has been ready for a while now to see how year one of LeBron's Cavs reboot turns out, or what might happen if the Warriors and Rockets meet in what would be a seven-game referendum on the MVP vote. We are hurrying up and waiting; we are bored.

The Celtics are an antidote to that. They're in the midst of their own sort of title race. Championships are supposed to be the most meaningful thing in a sport, but, in practice, that doesn't necessarily hold true. Think of when you are in the thrall of a close contest that for whatever reason—maybe there was a scrap in the second quarter, maybe this is Part XVI of a rivalry that's been going on for years—has come to matter. In the moment, when the teams are set at 96-94, and the clock is ticking down from 1:53, there is nothing else to consider other than what's in front of you. You are locked in on the court or your television screen; you care.

The game itself could be taking place in January or June, but that doesn't have much bearing on why we suddenly and decisively care about it. One team must win, the other must lose, and the outcome of this particular competition creates its own gravity. It becomes important, if only for that brief while. Would that Cavs-Spurs overtime game where Kyrie Irving dropped 57 points really have been more exciting had it happened during the NBA Finals? As Irving poured in buckets from increasingly improbable angles, could you have felt it any harder? Peak investment is peak investment.

Let's be clear: the Celtics don't have anyone nearly as talented as Kyrie Irving on their roster, or as entertaining. Their games don't feature so many gymnastic layups as they do Brandon Bass 14-footers, but they're all in on this playoff push, and they throw off real emotional heat even in this drowsy drought period for the league. Isaiah Thomas has no conscience. Kelly Olynyk's got a game like a coke rap punchline. Avery Bradley epitomizes competence. What's most appealing about the Celtics, especially at this juncture of the season, is that their play is imbued with purpose. This is a simple thing: watching all-things-considered pretty good basketball players try hard is entertaining. It's the basis of why we bother with sports in the first place.

There's an elegant argument to what the Celtics are doing, and that argument is fuck the lottery. If they wanted to tank, they could nab something like the ninth pick in the upcoming draft, but they've rejected the pursuit of that abstract—ambition is not the word for it—in favor of the straightforward satisfaction that comes from chasing a playoff spot. They've won 11 of their last 17, and they're treating it like something to celebrate, because it is.

One of the most wretched byproducts of the fan-as-amateur-general-manager phenomenon is that everything a team does is considered and evaluated in relation to some three-to-five year Plan Toward Dynasty-dom. The folks with Sam Presti posters on their ceilings are just being rational, they will tell you, but what they fail to grasp as they praise the Sixers teardown or tsk-tsk a win-now free agent signing is that to be without perspective is its own kind of bliss. We are, when we talk about sports, always talking about games, and nothing more serious than that. For all the corporate suit cosplaying fans do, and all the boardroom-ass jargon they toss out—discussing roster construction or asset acquisition or the intricacies of a collective bargaining agreement in which they didn't participate— they are, in the end, talking about how to become the very bestest basketball team in the whole wide world. They turn something eminently legible as fun and ultimately frivolous into what seems, from the outside looking in, like the grimmest, most emotionally fraught round of Monopoly ever played.

The Celtics approach to this season might seem foolish in the face of NBA conventional wisdom, but NBA conventional wisdom also informs the construction of 10 or so brutally bad teams every year, because no GM wants to go 37-and-45 anymore. Boston may seem not to understand what's good for them, but they actually understand what's good, and are creating something of value, more effectively than any of their starter-benching contemporaries.

To see the Celtics' quixotic, joyfully sloppy run and think this isn't sound strategy is to miss the point. It is to willfully subjugate the feelings a competitive game is meant to produce. Strip away draft position implications; don't worry about what the team will look like next year, or a half-decade from now; forget Danny Ainge even exists. Turn on a Celtics game, and see them straining toward victory, goofily underpowered and tentatively swaggerish, consumed by the work of (maybe) just barely getting where they aim to go. See all this, and know what they're doing can't possibly be wrong.