OKLAHOMA CITY — The Celtics entered the 2018-19 season as championship contenders, with a stacked and healthy roster featuring former All-Stars Kyrie Irving, Gordon Hayward, and Al Horford, as well as rising stars Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown
But the group never developed great chemistry. It won 49 regular-season games before being eliminated by the Bucks in the conference semifinals. That summer, Irving and Horford departed in free agency.
In a recent appearance on Clippers star Paul George’s podcast, Podcast P, Hayward said individual players had “too many agendas,” and that winning was not the primary focus. Hayward said he and Irving were looking to prove themselves after suffering injuries the previous year, and that Brown and Tatum were leading the group of younger players who were reluctant to cede the larger roles they’d embraced the previous year.
On Tuesday, Tatum mostly corroborated Hayward’s view.
“I mean, yeah, that [expletive] was terrible,” Tatum said. “You guys saw it. We’ve all talked about it. It didn’t work out how we wanted it to, and we were a very talented team but it just didn’t mesh the way we wanted it to. And that’s all right. Guys learned and everybody’s moved on from it. But what Gordon said was kind of right. Guys would come back from injury, guys were trying to prove themselves, like myself. I was trying to be better than I was last year, and it was just kind of a tough year.”
Tatum said there were no locker room issues. The players liked each other and got along. But he acknowledged that on-court chemistry was a problem.
“Everybody wanted to do more,” he said. “And we didn’t quite understand how we all could coexist with each other. And you just learn from that. No matter how talented a team is, it still has to work together and figure it out. And like Gordon said, we still made it to the second round. Like, it could have been worse.”
Hayward said on George’s podcast that he has been unsurprised by the ascensions of Tatum and Brown, who were both selected to All-NBA teams last year. He said that coach Brad Stevens, who has since taken over as president of basketball operations, told him during his free agent visit in 2017 that he envisioned Brown and Tatum taking the reins in three or four years.
So far this season, of course, the Celtics have developed an uncommon connection. Boston entered Tuesday night’s game against the Thunder with a 26-6 record, the best in the NBA. Tatum said some lessons learned in 2019 have helped along the way.
“I just understand what we’re trying to accomplish,” he said, “and learned how to coexist with other really good players.”
Time to step up
Tuesday’s game was the start of a challenging stretch for the Celtics following a few games against sub-.500 teams. The next three weeks Boston will face the Bucks, Timberwolves, Nuggets, and Heat. “We look at [the schedule] ahead of time,” Tatum said. “But I think we’ve done a pretty good job of taking it one game at a time. We try to approach every game the same, whether we’re playing a really good OKC team or a not-as-good Spurs team. We still want to approach the game and respect it the same way.” . . . Celtics assistant coach Sam Cassell missed Tuesday’s game due to an illness.
