Celtics’ feel-good season is one loss away from becoming a legacy-staining disaster

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Celtics’ feel-good season is one loss away from becoming a legacy-staining disaster

Matt Vautour · MassLive

Fri, May 1, 2026 ·

9 min read

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Suddenly, the Celtics are at risk of learning just how fast a feel-good story can turn into a cautionary tale.

One of the biggest knocks on the Jayson Tatum - Jaylen Brown era has been Boston ’s inability to finish off vulnerable teams. On Thursday night in Philadelphia , the Celtics got embarrassed by the Sixers in a game they probably shouldn’t even have been playing.

And because of that, all of the feel-good things that the Celtics have accomplished this year could be about to go up in smoke. Boston is on the ropes. The Celtics’ once commanding 3-1 lead is gone. The Sixers will come to Boston on Saturday smelling blood. They have all the momentum.

Joe Mazzulla’s team is facing pressure like this core group has never experienced. Only 13 teams have ever come back from down 3-1 and the Celtics pride themselves on being a franchise too good to let something like that happen.

This entire season has been portrayed like a nothing-to-lose, playing-with-house-money campaign for the Celtics. They traded Jrue Holiday and Kristaps Porzingis and didn’t re-sign Al Horford . Jayson Tatum missed most of the regular season, coming back from his torn Achilles.

It was reasonable to wonder just how good the Celtics would be with so many new faces and veterans playing expanded roles.

Instead, they spent the year winning games and flaunting how much better they were than what had been predicted for them. That was before Tatum came back.

When he did return, he wasn’t nearly as rusty as people prepared themselves for. He averaged 21.8 points and 10 rebounds, raising hopes even higher for this team’s potential.

The Celtics finished with the fourth best record in the league and secured the No. 2 seed in the East. Suddenly they came into the playoffs as the toast of the NBA, one of the favorites to win the East and go to the finals.

And when they speed-bagged the Sixers 123-91 to open the playoffs, it only fueled those expectations.

That will all be gone if they lose in Game 7. If Boston doesn’t at least make the second round, everything they’ve accomplished this year will have only raised the height which they’re falling from.

All the Jaylen Brown MVP and Joe Mazzulla Coach of the Year chatter will seem silly if their award-worthy regular seasons are followed by a postseason collapse.

It took Mazzulla years to earn respect, both around the NBA and in Boston. But the region had come around on his quirky personality, strange rotation decisions and 3-pointer-dependent offense as he led the Celtics to this much better-than-expected season.

But that respect will disappear faster than Etch-a-Sketch art in an earthquake if Boston loses on Saturday.

For Philadelphia, there’s glory to be achieved at TD Garden. They can be a rare play-in tournament team to knock off a potential contender. For the young Sixers backcourt it’s a chance to make a statement of arrival. For the veteran Philly frontcourt it’s a chance to put old demons to rest.

And for the City of Brotherly Love, it’s a chance to stop being the beaten-down younger sibling, that’s been tormented by Boston for 40 years.

The Sixers are playing to gain something. The Celtics are just trying to hang on to what they’ve got and avoid all the backlash that would come blowing a 3-1 lead to a team they were supposed to handle with relative ease.

If the Celtics win on Saturday, their hairier than expected path to the second round will just be a footnote as people get excited for the Boston vs. New York sequel in the second round.

But if they lose, it’ll be an awfully long and unpleasant offseason as Tatum, Brown and Mazzulla try to move past this stain on their legacies.

Outtakes from a busy week ...

Sam Kennedy is missing the point

Sam Kennedy went on the radio this week and defended John Henry against the wrong charge.

Kennedy, the Red Sox team president, has spent the better part of the last eight years trying to deflect arrows away from increasingly unaccountable principal owner John Henry.

After Alex Cora was fired , Kennedy went on WEEI’s morning drive show. Give Greg Hill credit. He works for the station that holds the Red Sox broadcasting rights and he asked the question anyway.

Why didn’t John Henry speak after a franchise-altering move?

Kennedy defended Henry , using a tactic he’s used on this topic before.

“John Henry is deeply engaged with this organization,” Kennedy said . “He has been since Day 1, going all the way back to 2002. For those of you who know John, he doesn’t always do it in the most public-facing way. He’s very selective in terms of how he engages with the media. But that should not ever be confused with a lack of involvement or care.”

The concern with Henry isn’t that he’s disengaged. It’s that he’s not as committed to winning anymore.

Since the Red Sox move to frugality happened before under Chaim Bloom and is still going with Craig Breslow, the stronger sentiment suggests that Henry is not only engaged, but he’s actually the problem.

Nobody is asking Henry to turn into Jerry Jones or host his own radio show. But it’s not unreasonable to do a press conference once a year at spring training and then take questions any time something monumental happens.

For what it’s worth, the media would be happy to talk to him about happy topics too.

But Henry has correctly surmised media complaining about access rarely plays well with fans. But that only holds true for so long.

The Red Sox are in turmoil. They’ve canned personnel chiefs and now the manager, while trading or not re-signing popular players. The team is getting harder and harder to like, while ticket prices go up. Fans, who once loved him for bringing four titles to Boston are turning on him.

A not-fully fleshed out anti-tanking NBA lottery plan

Here’s my still-in-progress plan to fix the NBA lottery:

Create five reasonable systems. Could be more, but for ease of explanation, we’ll start with five. Something like:

1. The current system.

2. The proposed “3-2-1 lottery that includes expanding the lottery to 16 teams, flattened odds.” This makes it better for finish between 4-10 than 1-3.

3. Simply use the reverse order of the standings (no lottery at all).

4. Draft order is created by the team with the most wins after being mathematically eliminated from the playoffs. This is not my idea, I just can’t remember who I saw that proposed it.

5. A recent story in the Athletic i ncludes a proposal by European economists.

“P = W − k(R − c) 2 — Every team gets lottery points (P) based on how many games it wins (W) minus a quadratic penalty for its ordinal rank among the 30 teams (R). Those lottery points then get summed up across all teams and converted into percentages for the draft lottery."

I have no idea what that actually means and that’s fine. I know that it rewards teams out of the playoffs for trying to win.

Those don’t have to be the five plans and there could be more than five. There are others and the league should consider hundreds of them and pick a small number to activate.

My wrinkle is that nobody knows how the lottery will be determined from year to year.

After the last game of the regular season is played, Adam Silver would pull out a ping-pong ball that tells people which plan will be used for this year’s lottery.

Teams can’t tank for a draft pick if they don’t know what system is being used.

I’m still working out the kinks, but it’s dramatic. It diminishes the motivation to try to lose and it would make for pretty good TV.

Good news for the Bruins?

The Bruins have done exactly the opposite of what the Celtics have done in every same-numbered game of their respective series. If that holds, the Celtics lost Game 6, so the Bruins should feel confident going into Friday night.

Game	Bruins	Celtics
1	Loss	Win
2	Win	Loss
3	Loss	Win
4	Loss	Win
5	Win	Loss
6	Friday	Loss
7	Sunday?	Saturday

The Top 5

Top 5 Horse Names in the 2026 Kentucky Derby

5. Great White - This horse is not white.

4. Intrepido

3. Danon Bourbon

2. Right to Party - This gets credit for the Beastie Boys homage, even though it’s one of their worst songs.

1. Incredibolt

Real Jeopardy! Clue

Sports clues from actual editions of America’s favorite quiz show. As always, mind the date

CATEGORY: Sports and the Movies - Final Jeopardy

Date: April 30, 2026

In 2026 a New Year’s Day college football game featured these 2 team names that are both Gene Hackman movie titles

— Answer below

Today in Massachusetts Sports History

May 1

1920— Boston Braves pitcher Joe Oeschger pitches all 26 innings in a 1-1 tie against the Brooklyn Dodgers in the longest game in major league history.

Lightning round

The NCAA reminded fans that it makes all decisions to serve big schools, their coaches and athletic directors. Expanding the men’s and women’s basketball tournaments to 76 teams further waters down a once-great event. It’s sad and it’s stupid.
It’s getting really tiring, trying to find where to watch Celtics games on TV.
The full Knicks-Hawks box score from New York’s 140-89 series-clinching win on Thursday is full of some ridiculous stats. The Knicks led 83-36 at halftime, at which point Jonathan Kuminga was -40. Before being ejected in the second quarter, Dyson Daniels was a -36 in less than 15 minutes of action.
If the Bruins lose this series, their mistake won’t have been not playing James Hagens, it will be having burned his entry level contract this season.

Real Jeopardy! Question:

Crimson Tide and Hoosiers

Finally...

Happy National School Lunch Hero Day and National Mother Goose Day to those who celebrate.

More Friday Outtakes

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