Your Boston Celtics are the reigning NBA Champions. That’s still fun to write and I may keep writing that at the start of every article all summer long. Oh yeah, and I have no intention of removing the “breaking news” banner at the top of the site until the Celtics actually raise their own banner. But I digress.
The Celtics are bringing back …pretty much everyone from their title team. They won 64 games in the regular season last year. The year before that they won 57 (we won’t talk about the playoffs because we never have to again).
Now we turn our attention to the upcoming regular season. Win totals are much less important than playoff results, but they are a pretty decent indicator of who will be there at the end.
I’m not a betting man, but I do enjoy seeing the Vegas over-under lines. They are a good early indicator of how teams stack up against each other in the minds of the consensus (yes, I know that betting volume tends to move the lines and I’m sure it is very complex – but this is close enough).
Draft Kings has the Celtics at 57.5 wins. So that begs the question, do you think the Celtics are going to exceed that number?
On one hand, the Celtics are just as good as they were a year ago and now have the swagger of an NBA champion.
On the other hand, they could take their foot off the gas a little believing that they can ramp back up in the playoffs. The rest of the league will be targeting the Celtics, though to be fair, I think most assumed they were one of the top teams to take down the last few years anyway. So they should be used to that. Of course Kristaps Porzingis will miss a few months of the season (and likely be brought up to speed slowly).
So I can see why the lines have the Celtics taking a little bit of a step back. Then again, they could take a step back and still be 2 steps ahead of the rest of the pack. So I guess we’ll see.
What do you think? Elaborate in the comments below!
