Even the most loyal of Boston Celtics will tell you that this season arguably was among one of the most disappointing in recent memory.
The C’s, with Kyrie Irving and Gordon Hayward returning to a young, promising lineup, were just about the end-all favorites to represent the Eastern Conference in the NBA Finals. Celtics fans instead got one of the most up and down roller coaster rides you could imagine, and a litany of woes and groans from the players throughout the campaign.
All of that resulted in team owner Wyc Grousbeck calling this “one of the hardest to love,” when he appeared on 98.5’s “Felger & Mazz,” on Wednesday afternoon.
Grousbeck was asked if this was the hardest team for Brad Stevens to coach, and the owner would only answer from his perspective.
“It was one of the hardest teams to love from my standpoint,” Grousbeck said, as transcribed on 985sportshub.com. “I’d rather answer for myself. I wasn’t coaching them but I was watching them, and it was frustrating. It was a tough year for everybody concerned. I think the fans all feel that and we’re going to just try to make it better. But we all feel that, and man, the highs and lows – it’s been frustrating.”
It certainly was a frustrating season to watch, as Irving assured everyone that the team would be fine come playoff time, then exited rather quietly against the Milwaukee in the second round after just five games.
It was clear that the Celtics were not able to come together the way they expected to, much like the team did last year when playoff time came around, and ultimately led to Grousbeck calling the team “a mess.”
“You can’t really say beforehand that it’s going to work or not, so we didn’t know going in that we were going to have a chemistry problem,” Grousbeck said. “In fact, we had good chemistry in the playoffs last year. It looked like things were working, then we added more players to the mix – Gordon getting healthier and Kyrie getting healthier coming back from two knee surgeries – we thought it would work better than it did. It’s not like we said ‘The hell with chemistry, we know this was a mess but we’re going to try to get out of it with talent’. We didn’t know it was a mess. It turned out to be, at times, really good – and at times, more of a mess.”
