Can Celtics succeed where all recent NBA champions have failed?

Posted by Admin September 10, 2024 NBA

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The Celtics’ long-awaited 18th NBA championship was a weight lifted for franchise centerpieces Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown, who’d watched the team fall short in the conference finals or NBA finals in five of the previous seven seasons.

“But another burden,” veteran guard Jrue Holiday said less than an hour after Boston’s title-clinching win over Dallas back in June, “is doing it again.”

That burden proved too heavy for every recent NBA champion to bear.

After decades defined by dynastic runs from the Los Angeles Lakers, San Antonio Spurs, Miami Heat and Golden State Warriors, we’re now in an age of extreme basketball parity. The last six NBA champs all failed to repeat the following season. The last five didn’t come close.

Holiday was on one of those teams: the 2021-22 Milwaukee Bucks, whose back-to-back bid stalled out in the Eastern Conference semifinals.

As the Celtics, who stampeded their way through a dominant 2023-24 season and postseason and return nearly their entire roster for 2024-25, look to buck that trend, here’s a look back at why the last six title defenses fell short:

2018-19 Golden State Warriors

Result: Lost in NBA Finals

Golden State’s shot at a three-peat was dashed by untimely injuries, most notably to superstar Kevin Durant, who missed nearly all of the NBA Finals with calf and Achilles injuries. Klay Thompson also tore his ACL in the Finals-clinching loss to Toronto, leaving the loaded Warriors without two of their best players.

The 2018-19 Warriors are an outlier on this list. No NBA champion since even reached the conference finals the following season. Golden State also is the last reigning champ to earn the No. 1 playoff seed in its conference.

2019-20 Toronto Raptors

Result: Lost in Eastern Conference semifinals

It’s exceedingly difficult to repeat when you lose your only true superstar. That’s what happened to the Raptors, who watched 2019 Finals MVP Kawhi Leonard bolt for the Los Angeles Clippers a month after leading Toronto to its first title.

Leonard’s departure didn’t completely cripple the Raptors, as they finished second in the East in 2020 with the likes of Pascal Siakam, Kyle Lowry and Fred VanVleet headlining their roster. But they were bounced by the ascending Celtics in seven games in the NBA’s COVID-19 bubble and haven’t made it past the first round since.

2020-21 Los Angeles Lakers

Result: Lost in first round

After their bubble championship followed by the shortest offseason in league history, the Lakers started hot but then were pummeled by injuries. LeBron James and Anthony Davis missed a combined 63 games during the regular season, and Davis went down again in the opening round of the playoffs. LA bowed out in six games to become the first defending champion in nearly a decade to fail to reach the conference semifinals.

2021-22 Milwaukee Bucks

Result: Lost in Eastern Conference semifinals

The Bucks got another sensational season and postseason from two-time NBA MVP Giannis Antetokounmpo, but an injury to one of his crucial sidekicks derailed their title defense. Khris Middleton, Milwaukee’s second-leading scorer, suffered a season-ending MCL sprain two games into the playoffs. Without him, the Bucks got within a game of the conference finals but were blown out in Game 7 by the Celtics, who went on to win the East.

2022-23 Golden State Warriors

Result: Lost in Western Conference semifinals

Golden State’s championship in 2022 was the last gasp of a historic dynasty. By 2023, their time was through. 34-year-old Stephen Curry missed 26 games. Thompson and Draymond Green both were past their prime at 32. Andrew Wiggins, who killed the Celtics in the ’22 Finals, was unavailable for more than half the season. The Warriors were back to full strength by the playoffs but didn’t make it out of the second round, losing to the Lakers in six games.

2023-24 Denver Nuggets

Result: Lost in Western Conference semifinals

The Nuggets lost valuable role player Bruce Brown to free agency last offseason, and Jamal Murray dealt with his typical injury issues, missing 14 games in October and November and seven more in March and April. But neither of those was the biggest factor in Denver’s failure to repeat. What was? A sudden spike in legitimate championship contenders in the Western Conference.

The top three teams in the West all finished with 56 or 57 wins – including the upstart Thunder and Timberwolves, neither of whom had even won 50 games in the previous seven seasons – and none of them reached the NBA Finals. The fifth-seeded Mavericks made a surprise run to a conference title before being vanquished by the juggernaut Celtics. Denver had the best player in the league (Nikola Jokic, who won his third MVP in four years) and couldn’t get past the conference semis.

What can Boston learn from those six unsuccessful encores? That high-end talent and star power matters, but so does the depth needed to withstand the injury issues that inevitably arise.

The Celtics had both last season, boasting the best top-to-bottom roster in the NBA and hardly blinking when they lost their third-best player (Kristaps Porzingis) for most of the playoffs. They also benefited from playing in a weakened and injury-depleted Eastern Conference, giving them a far more manageable postseason path than their counterparts out West.

Every player of consequence from that title-winning Celtics squad is back. Their only two offseason departures (Oshae Brissett and Svi Mykhailiuk) ranked 12th and 13th in minutes per game last season and hardly saw the floor in the playoffs. They’ll need to weather Porzingis’ early-season absence – the standout center is unlikely to play before December as he recovers from leg surgery – and navigate what should be a stronger East after the rival Knicks and 76ers made moves to beef up their rosters.

But Boston will enter the season as the clear favorite to defend its title. Just don’t tell Joe Mazzulla, who pooh-poohed that phrase in a recent interview with the Locked On Celtics podcast.

“People are going to say that you’re defending a quote-unquote title, but I think the word ‘defend’ is a very passive-aggressive term,” the Celtics’ incomparably intense head coach said. “You go back to the animal kingdom; some of the strongest animals don’t defend. They’re the most aggressive, and they attack the most.”

Originally Published: September 10, 2024 at 4:39 p.m.