Does Jaylen Brown become a consensus top 20 guy?
Perhaps the more confounding legacy belongs to Tatum’s teammate. While Tatum has shown that he can be the top dog on a contender, Brown has mostly played second banana on these Celtics. Which is fine—it’s just that Brown signed a record-breaking $304 million contract last summer. That’s obviously an eye-popping number for anyone, but especially for someone who is widely considered the second-best player on his own team.
A strong Finals from Brown would do wonders for his reputation. The man has been in the league for eight years and, despite the dollars, has just one All-NBA nod. (He does, of course, have a fresh Eastern Conference Finals MVP trophy, too.) Would securing a title officially put him ahead of ringless contemporaries like Devin Booker, Paul George, and Jimmy Butler?
Is Jrue Holiday a Hall of Famer?
Listen, it’s not as crazy as your knee-jerk reaction indicates. Bringing it home this year would give Holiday two championships, six All-Defensive Teams, and two All-Star nods. He’s also the proud owner of an Olympic gold medal. Look, the answer is almost definitely no, but his resume isn’t too far off from that of Mitch Richmond, who was inducted in 2014.
Are these Celtics the best non-Warriors champions of the last 10 years?
Expect talking heads to whack this question around like a badminton birdie. The Celts’ 64 regular-season wins are already the most by an NBA Finals team since the 2016-17 Warriors rattled off 67, and 10 years ago, the Spurs’ artistic brand of basketball blew up LeBron’s Miami era. LeBron rebounded by piloting the immortal 2016 Cavs. Could the 2024 Celtics hang with any of them?
Start with the Cavs. Similar to Boston this year, the bulk of Cleveland’s scoring that year came from its two superstars. The question—if you’re really trying to get in the weeds here, which we obviously are—is whether the Celtics’ next four guys (Holiday, Derrick White, Kristaps Porzingis, and Al Horford) are better than Cleveland’s (Kevin Love, J.R. Smith, Tristan Thompson, and Richard Jefferson) were in 2016.
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