James' World 2

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At the start of training camp, early last October, the Boston Celtics’ social-media team posted a video of Jaylen Brown, the team’s All-Star guard, practicing his dribble. In it, Brown, his back to the camera, pounds a few hard dribbles with his right hand, then shifts the ball to his left. The ball begins to stray. Brown hitches it back. Then the ball swings farther to the left, and Brown pulls it back too sharply; he has to step forward to corral it. He regains control for a few dribbles, but, when the clip cuts off, the ball is about to bounce out of the frame.

The video disappeared from the Celtics’ channels, but not before it was widely shared, often with unflattering commentary. Just weeks earlier, Brown had signed a contract for about three hundred million dollars, the largest in N.B.A. history. This was not a surprise; he was the first player to be eligible for so much money, partly on the basis of being named to a list of the league’s best players in the season prior. And he is an aggressive, dynamic scorer, plus a tenacious defender capable of guarding anyone. Still, there was the matter of that dribble. The last time Brown had played in an N.B.A. game, in the deciding contest of the Eastern Conference Finals, against the Miami Heat, he’d had eight turnovers, many of them mishaps while dribbling with his left hand.

The favored Celtics lost that game, and, with it, the series, to the underdog Heat, in a blowout. Never mind that the team’s best player, Jayson Tatum, had got injured just after the game began—the reasonable consensus was that the Celtics, who were playing in their fifth Eastern Conference Finals in the past seven years, should have beaten the Heat easily. The loss was an embarrassment; the inconsistent performances of Tatum in clutch situations were picked apart, over and over. The team’s rookie head coach, Joe Mazzulla, who had led the team to the second-best record in the conference, was criticized as not being ready for prime time. People questioned the fit between Brown and Tatum, who did not always complement each other’s strengths in quite the way that some of the league’s most famous duos did. Brown’s name popped up in trade rumors. In the end, Brad Stevens, who had coached Brown and Tatum when they arrived in the league before moving to the front office, signed Brown to the big contract—then traded half of the rest of the team’s rotation.

When the new season began, the Celtics played like one of the best teams in N.B.A. history. They had the highest-rated offense of all time and a defense that was nearly as good. Their net rating, a statistical calculation of a team’s overall performance, put this year’s Celtics alongside the league’s most legendary teams, including Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls and Steph Curry’s Golden State Warriors at their peaks. Boston won multiple games by more than fifty points, something only two teams had done before. And yet many commentators, and even some of the team’s fans, seemed reluctant to accept this evidence. “The Celtics record (76-20) & point differential (+10.4) say they’re an all-time team,” a popular sports talk-radio host tweeted recently, after the Celtics swept this year’s Eastern Conference Finals, against the Indiana Pacers. “The eye test says they are not close to that.” Why, when it comes to this team, do people see something different from what the results suggest? What do we think greatness should look like?

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