For a region that has celebrated over the past two-plus decades more world championships in the four major sports — 12 — than any other city (LA is next with 9, with double the number of teams), the Hub’s collective level of confidence in our teams to finish the job remains jarringly low.
Even when one of our teams has a dominant season, perhaps even a record-breaking one, we can’t seem to be able to sit back and make plans for the championship parade until it actually happens, whether they’re “battle-tested” or not.
Perhaps all cities are like this, with a history of missed-it-by-that-much heartbreak, but New England sports fans have too many examples of a team that on paper should have run away with a championship to cap off a superb season only to find a way to blow it — oftentimes against what is viewed as an inferior opponent.
This comes up now, of course, because after the Celtics’ Game 1 rout of the Dallas Mavericks in the opener of the NBA Finals Thursday night, Boston would seem to be in the catbird seat to finally chalk up its 18th championship, particularly because of the additions of Kristaps Porzingis and Jrue Holiday, coupled with the departures of Marcus Smart and Grant Williams.
After all, Boston was in the top five in nearly every statistical category, on both the offensive and defensive sides this season as the Celtics had the best record in the NBA and 64 wins that were seven better than the next-best team in the league. The C’s only lost four times on their home court, which is second only to the 1985-86 Celtics juggernaut that went 40-1 on the Garden parquet (and a ridiculous 50-1 if you include the postseason), and had a bit of an easy road to the Finals against hobbled and overmatched playoff opponents.
So why do local fans still harbor some doubt about this edition of the Celtics?
Well, before we look at some other local teams’ dominant seasons that ended in ignominious defeat, let’s look at the Green themselves. Let’s hop in the Way-Back Machine and go back to the late spring of 1985. A year ahead of the record-setting 1985-86 team and yet still the defending NBA champions of a year earlier, the 1984-85 Celtics blitzed their way to the NBA Finals, where who else but the Lakers, the vanquished opponent of the 1984 Finals, lay in wait.
In Game 1, on a glorious Memorial Day holiday in Boston, the C’s came out blazing, building a 79-49 lead at halftime, en route to a 148-114 thrashing of their hated rivals, and the game instantly became known as the Memorial Day Massacre.
That’s how a lot of folks felt after Thursday’s blowout of the Mavs in similar fashion, but the funny thing is, there is no 1985 championship banner hanging in the TD Garden rafters because the Lakers somehow took four of the next five games, including two in Boston, to top the Celtics for the first time ever in NBA Finals matchups.
Los Angeles has fashioned eight more world championships since that spring of 1985, while Boston, a dominant champion in 1986, has only won one more title since that one, and that was 16 seasons ago.
Now Boston hoops fans have the most complete team since that 2007-’08 squad, and yet some doubt still permeates our souls. Perhaps one can point to the team just two years ago that got all the way to the NBA Finals for the first time since the 2010 club, and even stole Game 1 in the City by the Bay and enjoyed a 2-1 series lead and a fourth-quarter advantage in Game 4 before choking away that tilt and the subsequent two games to fall to the past-peak Warriors in six games.
Or perhaps, switching sports, Boston fans still cannot fathom how their 2007 New England Patriots, the first-ever team to enter a Super Bowl at 18-0 with a very realistic chance to complete the perfect season, lost to a wild-card team from the NFC that had to win three road games just to get to Glendale, AZ. Fans to this day still cannot believe that that particular edition of the Patriots lost that game, because on paper that squad was viewed as indestructible and invincible.
But seasons like that resonate because Boston fans realize that even the most superior team during the regular season cannot necessarily be trusted to complete the task.
You can also ask the New England Revolution about their record-setting 2021 season.
That star-crossed campaign saw the Revs win their first Supporters’ Shield in club history by having the best record in the regular season, 22-5-7, and their 41 points were six better than the second-best team in the East as well as the West’s best team. With four-time MLS Coach of the Year Bruce Arena at the helm — the owner of five MLS Cups, four Supporters’ Shields, a US Open Cup and a CONCACAF Championship over 17 seasons as an MLS head coach — what could possibly go wrong? Well, for starters, a 23-day break from the end of the regular season and the opener of the league playoffs after the Revs earned a first-round bye, and you can probably guess what happened next: a brutal loss in the playoff opener in a shootout to New York City FC — a team that had quietly gone 5-0-3 down the stretch in the regular season and kept that momentum going all the way to the team’s first-ever MLS Cup championship. The Revs, meanwhile, still await their first since the league’s inception in 1996.
Finally, Celtics fans are also well-aware of the shortcomings in recent years of their TD Garden co-tenants, the Boston Bruins.
In the spring of 2019, after a decent regular season, the Bruins, in typical fashion, knocked out the Maple Leafs in seven games in the opening round. They then found themselves playing wild-card teams in back-to-back rounds before landing in the Cup Final with home-ice advantage against the West’s third-seeded team, the St. Louis Blues.
Cakewalk for the B’s, right? Well, not when you lose three of your four games on home ice, which is what the Bruins did and saw the Blues skate merrily around the Garden ice with Lord Stanley’s chalice.
But wait, there’s more! Just last spring, as you may recall, the Bruins ran rings around their regular-season competition and were launched as heavy favorites to win their seventh Stanley Cup on the eve of their 100th NHL season.
Again, what could go wrong? Plenty. Playing an eighth-seeded Florida Panthers team that had completed the regular season on a 6-1-1 roll, the Bruins harkened back to the 2019 Cup Finals, dropping three of four on home ice and blowing a 3-1 series lead in the process, and the historic season was done in the first round.
All of these recent failures should not necessarily be highlighted when talking about these Celtics and their current appearance in the NBA Finals, but local fans have seen more disappointment than championships in the past 1,950 days. So, while this Boston team seems poised to finally break the region’s five-year championship drought, fans will rightly have to temper their enthusiasm and expectations until Kyrie, Luca, and the rest of the Mavs are vanquished once and for all.