While Boston lost Jayson Tatum in Game 4 to a ruptured Achilles tendon, it blew two 20-point leads in Games 1 and 2 and struggled to find any rhythm in Game 6.
So, what went wrong?
“It seems like they get bored sometimes with the — I don’t want to say the process. Because I mean, (expletive), they are who they are, and when you look at Tatum and (Jaylen) Brown, this is years and years and years and years, they’ve punched their 10,000 hours,” LeBron James said during a recent appearance on the “Mind The Game podcast." “But sometimes it seems like they get a little bored because of how great they are. Not only as those two as individuals, but then as a team sometimes it looks like they get bored.”
The Celtics, on paper, were the better team in the series. They showed fight in Game 5 to crawl back into the series, but fell completely flat in a must-win Game 6.
Perhaps some of that boredom James talked about led to falling in a 2-0 hole after dropping the first two games at TD Garden despite holding large leads. Perhaps the Celtics thought they’d have their way with the Knicks like they did in the regular season.
Regardless of whether they did get bored, the Celtics have an offseason ahead of him that has a lot of questions — something that would have awaited them whether they moved on to the Eastern Conference Finals or not.
