Ahead of the 2021-22 season, nobody predicted that the Boston Celtics would be just two wins away from winning the championship. But that's exactly what happened over these past few months, and the Cs were clearly enjoying the ride.
Now that it's over, and the Celtics ended their season in defeat, young point guard Marcus Smart isn't having the easiest time forgetting how close his team was to winning it all. In a chat with beat writer Adam Himmelsbach, Smart admitted that losing the 2022 Finals is literally keeping him up at night.
“I have moments where it’s late at night and I can’t sleep, and all of a sudden I’m thinking about those games and what we could’ve done differently,” Smart told The Boston Globe’s Adam Himmelsbach. “And, I wish we didn?t run out of gas. Obviously, those series we went through to get to the Finals were so brutal. But, I wouldn’t change a thing about it. You hate to find your lessons in defeat, but sometimes you have to see rain before a rainbow.”
Had the Cs avoided a few mistakes in those last three games, things could have turned out differently, and Smart wouldn't be kicking himself for letting the fans down.
“I lay in bed thinking about our execution. We had so many damn turnovers, man, it was ridiculous. Unfortunately, that’s what we’d been doing the last couple of series. We flirted with it and it finally backfired and it bit us in our butts.”
The Celtics had the chance to walk away as champions, but they failed to close the deal in the end and they'll have to live with those results.
The only thing the team can do now is move on and gear up for next season when they'll have another chance to bring glory to Boston. Hopefully, all the experience they gained in the 2022 playoffs will propel their success moving forward.
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