The Celtics 2019 Season
Going into the 2017-18 NBA season, the Boston Celtics basically blew up their entire roster and acquired two NBA All-Stars in Kyrie Irving and Gordon Hayward. They also acquired from the draft what seems to be a future superstar, Jayson Tatum, who had a spectacular first year, adding to their roster who the season prior, was the one seed.
Unfortunately this team’s star-studded roster only played together completely healthy for about five minutes the entire season. In the season opener against the Cleveland Cavaliers, Gordon Hayward suffered a very serious ankle injury, keeping him out the remainder of the season.
Starting shooting guard of the Harborfields Basketball team and star Golf player Ryan Rittberger stated, “At first I didn’t see what happened, then the camera switched. That was probably the worst injury I’ve seen in the NBA ever.”
Later in the season Kyrie Irving, who in a past finals series suffered a knee injury that never quite healed, hurt his knee once again and after this injury he didn’t want to take the chance of having his knee injured beyond repair, so he got knee surgery and was out for the remainder of the season. Al Horford, who is the veteran of the team, suffered sporadic injuries as well as their young star Jaylen Brown, their starting lineup was constantly changing and only had one or two remaining players from the starting lineup at the beginning of the season left at the end of the season. Now all these players are healthy, so many are saying the Celtics won’t be able to keep that team together with that many starting caliber players and they’re not going to be able to split up the minutes, but that isn’t true.
This season, the players who are in the mix for the starting lineup are Kyrie Irving, Gordon Hayward, Jaylen Brown, Jayson Tatum, Al Horford, Marcus Smart, Terry Rozier, and debatably the new rookie on the team. There are only five players in an NBA starting lineup. For the Celtics, their only definite starters are Kyrie, Hayward, and Horford. Besides those three all-stars four of the potential starters play the guard/forward position. So how do you keep all these starter caliber players happy with such limited minutes to give out? The great thing about the Celtics is they have one of the best coaches in the NBA... Brad Stevens, who is very good at making sure everybody gets their chance with the ball, on any given night any player on the roster can get hot and take the reigns that night due to the “spread the wealth’ brand of basketball Brad Stevens runs. At the end of the day these players want to win, the Celtics are lucky because all their players are willing to do whatever they can to help their team win.