I cannot believe that I’m about to quote Pat Riley, but he did coin a killer phrase in his 1988 book Showtime to describe why it’s so hard for teams to repeat as champions: the “disease of more.”
Google those three words, and you’re almost certainly going to encounter this quote: “success is often the first step toward disaster.” This is what we in the bizz call an emotionally potent oversimplification, but it does hold a kernel of truth. Winning teams are usually built on teamwork, selflessness and an almost-uncanny commitment to sacrifice in search of a common goal.
The 2023-24 Boston Celtics epitomized this commitment. Jayson Tatum didn’t care about Finals MVP awards, and Jaylen Brown didn’t care if he had to pick up Luka Doncic 94 feet for an entire playoff series. Payton Pritchard even accepted he would be playing a special teams role and taking half court shots, and it all blended together and produced a championship.
But what comes next?
Option one is the disease. People start chasing awards and legacies, and all the buy-in from the role players, star player and equipment managers turns into everyone searching for new opportunities and chasing shiny things. This isn’t unique to the Celtics, since Pat Riley was writing about it in the late 80s, and the players themselves will surely try to avoid it.
But today’s players have to deal with something prior generations couldn’t even have imagined: championship stress and relief. Did everyone catch the look on Tatum’s face after the Celtics won? Was it happiness? Euphoria? A sense of accomplishment or camaraderie? There was some of that stuff, but what I saw most was relief.
Relief changes how people act. The dead-set motivation required to win a championship is often spurned on by the creeping knowledge that oh-my-god-if-we-don’t-win-everyone-is-going-to-hate-us-and-call-us-frauds-and-we’ll-have-to-be-on-internet-lists-about-the-best-teams-never-to-win-a-championship-oh-my-god-oh-my-god.
The Celtics kept their entire core together, which means this stress and relief will be basically uniform. That sense of doom is now gone, so the Celtics will have to remain committed the old-fashioned way: cultural demand. At least nobody will be motivated by a new contract, which might be a good thing but could just as easily be a bad thing. I’m not sure yet.
It won’t be enough for that commitment to stay the same, either. The league is going to adapt, and even with the Celtics’ half-a-billion-dollar talent advantage, the NBA is not just going to sit back and watch while Boston walks through them again. The Eastern Conference is already much better, and the Celtics could run into all sorts of problems on their next playoff run that they conveniently dodged last time. They’ll have to come up with new answers, new curveballs and new models of battering rams if they want to win again.
Desire to win it all — real desire, not just the surface level kind that Chris Paul teams have been putting out there for half my life — can come from anywhere and everywhere, but it’s no longer going to be from the endless fountain of existential motivation that have dominated the last two years.
We all know the talent is there, so question one is pretty simple: are we going to see a Celtics team afflicted by ulterior motives? Or will we see one with evolved focus ready to send the league into its next dynasty? It could easily be something in the middle, and then we’ll have to see just how in the middle Boston can live with.
