The Boston Celtics might have been crowned as the favorite to win the Eastern Conference, but Terry Rozier doesn’t want his teammates to rest on their press clippings.
Boston is loaded with talent and with Kyrie Irving and Gordon Hayward being added to a team that was a win away from reaching the NBA Finals last season, there’s no reason the C’s shouldn’t be one of the best teams in the NBA.
But with the start of the regular season a little more than a week away, Rozier feels the Celtics are entering the season with a feeling of complacency and he knows that has to change.
“I feel like we need to get our mind right. Take some time off,” Rozier said after Saturday’s preseason loss to the Cleveland Cavaliers, per Celtics.com. “But at the same time, we gotta get out there and just find our way. I feel like we arrived like we already won something. Teams know that people are talking about us every time you turn on the TV, so that’s going to motivate them to want to beat us no matter if it’s the second string, third string, no matter who it is. We’ve got to stay grounded and go back to playing Boston Celtics basketball and being who we are instead of thinking we’re above everybody.”
Rozier has a point. Countless teams have been anointed as preseason favorites only to underperform because they believed they could just show up and be a championship-caliber team without putting in the necessary work.
The Celtics very well could run through the Eastern Conference and secure their first NBA Finals appearance since 2010. But with the Toronto Raptors and Philadelphia 76ers also looking to own the East, the C’s must be 100 percent locked in if they plan to reach their sky-high ceiling.
