In years past, you could usually bank on the Boston Celtics showing life at the end of games.
Far too often in 2020-21, that has not been the case. Danny Ainge knows it, too.
This season has been a wildly disappointing one for the Celtics, who entered the season as one of the Eastern Conference favorites, only to underperform at just about every turn.
The latest installment came in both legs of a back-to-back Tuesday and Wednesday, which resulted in losses to the Utah Jazz and, more embarrassingly, Cleveland Cavaliers.
Appearing on 98.5 The Sports Hub on Thursday, the C's president of basketball operations flat admitted that his team doesn't have some important qualities.
“We’ve struggled to close out games and we’ve struggled with consistency," Ainge said, via NBC Sports Boston's Chris Forsberg. "It seems like we don’t have a lot of characteristics of a really good team, for sure."
Of course, some of that is the product of roster-building, a sword Ainge has fallen on multiple times already this season.
Now the question becomes: Is this a team worth investing in at the trade deadline or should Boston accept this as a lost season, do as well as it can in the playoffs and just go back to the drawing board in the offseason? Ainge only has a few more days to come up with the answer.
