No one could have predicted the Boston Celtics would begin the season 10-10, including a horrible loss to the lowly New York Knicks at TD Garden. But that's the situation Boston found itself in a quarter of the way into the 2018-19 season, but to their credit, they've turned it around.
The Celtics have won eight of their last nine games and nine of their last 11 to move up the Eastern Conference standings. They are within just two games of the first-place Toronto Raptors in the loss column.
Boston's start obviously wasn't ideal, but going through that kind of struggle and finding a way out could benefit the team long-term, as Al Horford recently explained to the Boston Herald's Steve Bulpett.
“I think so,” Al Horford told the Herald. “It’s very rare for a team not to go through adversity in a season. I mean, I think the only team that I can think of that probably didn’t was the Warriors won 73 games, but well, they lost to Cleveland (in the NBA Finals) that year. But that regular season was magical.
“And I think for our group, going through that early has made us stronger and tighter and made us understand that we need to play at a certain level and do certain things to win. So, for us, I think that was very beneficial because if we would have started out good and won some games, some of these issues that were underlying, winning would take care of that. But they’d still be there. Now all those things have been addressed thoroughly. We’re still going through it, but we’re learning.”
Horford is one of the most veteran players on the C's roster, and he's been on teams that have won 60 games and those that have struggled. This kind of broad perspective and experience help make him a great leader for a Celtics team with a lot of young players.
The Celtics added two All-Star caliber players into the lineup in Kyrie Irving and Gordon Hayward at the beginning of the season. Both missed considerable time in 2017-18 due to injuries. It's not easy to incorporate two great players into the fold because it changes the roles of other players, most notably Jaylen Brown, Terry Rozier and Jayson Tatum.
Finding the right lineup combinations to maximize the talent on this deep roster was not going to happen immediately. The C's seem to have found many of the right combinations over the last two weeks, beginning with Marcus Smart and Marcus Morris entering the starting five.
Boston Celtics
The Celtics still aren't firing on all cylinders, but luckily for them, they have a soft upcoming schedule against inferior opponents that should provide ample opportunity to improve before the most challenging parts of the season arrive.
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