Defending champs ready to get back to work

BRIGHTON, Mass. — The good news for the Boston Celtics is that they will begin the 2024-25 season as defending NBA champions.

The news for the Celtics is that they will begin the 2024-25 season as defending NBA champions.

These contradictions were on display Tuesday morning as the Celtics held their annual pre-preseason media day at the Auerbach Center. Part of the event was to do a little re-celebrating of the Celtics’ five-game dismissal of the Dallas Mavericks in the NBA Finals, but it was mostly about reminding everybody that June 17, 2024 — Celtics 106 Mavericks 88 — was a long, long time ago in a season far, far away.

Celtics president Brad Stevens knows this as well as anyone. He did, after all, form a bromance with former Patriots coach Bill Belichick during their shared time in the Boston sports market, and Belichick was famous for getting frosty (or frostier) when anyone dared to pose a question about last year’s big Super Bowl victory over (fill in name of NFC team here). Stevens isn’t much for frosty/frostier, but he did get right to it:

“Everybody’s going to eagerly anticipate a new season, right now, today,” he said. “The defending champions, and everyone else. And then reality hits you, and the third practice you’re a little bit more sore, and then you’ve got your first game and you see how that goes. Some guys play, don’t play. The (players in the) locker room start to not be as jovial as they once were, and people start to separate themselves and teams start to separate themselves. But you gotta do it again.”

With that one can of words, Stevens placed the Celtics in the company of every other team in the NBA, from the short list of true championship contenders right down to the, oh, let’s say Brooklyn Nets. The message was well-crafted but also blunt.

Now make no mistake, Stevens also had some fun at this gathering. As he exited the room he turned to a club official and said, “Now I gotta go yell for the Jumbotron.” The joke is easily explained: As Stevens was doing his introductory media briefing, his players were downstairs on the court, taking part in a conveyor belt of promos, PSAs and, yes, those little sound bites in which they scream for the fans to get up, to cheer, and so on. (Just to be on the safe side, a cursory phone call was later placed to Celtics senior vice president of communications Christian Megliola to see if we might be getting Brad Stevens screaming, “Let’s get ready to rumble!!!” from TD Garden’s massive center-court flat screens this season. Sadly, that won’t be happening.)

If everything goes right this season (spoiler alert: things have a way of not going right), the Celtics should be right back in the NBA Finals next spring. And, yet, while the Celtics return largely intact from last season, there’s some intrigue worth monitoring with this team. Admittedly, some of the intrigue is soap-operish and subjective and won’t likely resonate with Celtics fans. On the road, however, it’s stuff that might keep coming up over and over. It’ll be on the Celtics to flick it away like lint.

Tuesday was all about getting in shape for that.

For instance, there’s Jaylen Brown not being selected to play on the United States Olympic basketball team. It was the first question posed to Brown when he did his media session, and, yep, he flicked it away like lint. “Question No. 1!” Brown said, smiling in a way that exposed every one of his teeth. “Do I get to warm up a little?”

Jayson Tatum play in the Olympics, but not much. Asked what he “learned” from his “experience” on the team, Tatum answered the question with a question: “That’s a broad question,” he said. “You want to be more specific?”

Tatum then looked down on his right shoulder, as though poised to literally flick away lint.

The question was recast into something about motivation.

“Want to address that I didn’t play in two of those games, is that what you mean?” Tatum asked. “Uhh, motivation. I guess you could say that, if you want to simplify. In real time it was tough.” He quickly pivoted to Celtics coach Joe Mazzulla and said, “I talk to Joe a lot, and Joe was probably the happiest person in the world that I didn’t win Finals MVP and then I didn’t play in two of the games in the Olympics.

“That was odd,” Tatum continued, “but if you know Joe. It makes sense. Did I need any extra motivation coming into the season? No, I’m not going to give anybody in particular credit that they’re motivating me to come into the season. It was a unique circumstance. Something I haven’t experienced before in my playing career, but I’m a believer that everything happens for a reason.”

He went on to say, “Whatever the reason is, I haven’t figured it out yet …. but it was a good experience. We won a gold medal, my second one.”

Judge’s verdict: For anyone harping that Tatum’s still harping about the Olympics, he was asked the question. And it was on media day, which is a time when even hardened veterans tend to put out the good china in terms of how they answer questions. To borrow a phrase believed to be coined by the late NBA referee Sid Borgia: no harm, no foul.

Besides, nobody put this in perspective better than Derrick White, who did make the Olympic team and who did play. Asked if there were any elephants in the room, White said, “No, there’s no elephants in there.”

What about the news that Wyc Grousbeck and family plan to sell their majority stake in the team?

“I guess the money side and him selling, that’s kind of him, that’s his situation,” said Jrue Holiday, flicking lint. There may well come a day when new ownership cuts back on the spending, but the Celtics aren’t there yet. Anyway, Holiday isn’t.

If there’s one actual basketball question that needs to be addressed, it’s the health of big man Kristaps Porzingis, who is recovering from offseason surgery to repair a tendon in his left ankle. “Feeling pretty good,” he said. “Looking forward to keep making progress at this rate and hopefully be back out there with the guys as soon as possible.” Porzingis later told ESPN he thinks he can be back by December.

Summary: The 2024-25 Celtics have some chips on their ample shoulders, but also a lot of lint. It was all good news from the Celtics on media day … except for the announcement that Brad Stevens won’t be screaming from the Garden flatscreens.

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.