June 2024 felt like the beginning of a dynasty.
The Boston Celtics had just dismantled the Dallas Mavericks in five games to claim their record 18th NBA championship. Jayson Tatum was ascending. Jaylen Brown had his Finals MVP. Joe Mazzulla, the young coach everyone underestimated, had quietly built one of the most dominant teams in the league. The Celtics weren't just champions — they looked like the team of the era.
One year later, they were watching the Knicks celebrate in the second round.
So what happened?
The Run-Up: Four Years of Elite Ball
To understand 2025, you have to zoom out.
The Celtics have been a genuinely great team for four consecutive seasons. That's not a small thing in a league built on parity. Here's the arc:
- 2021–22 (51–31): The resurrection. Ime Udoka's team came out of nowhere, ran through Brooklyn, Milwaukee, and Miami, and pushed Golden State to six games in the Finals before losing.
- 2022–23 (57–25): The near-miss. Looked like a title favorite, beat Atlanta and Philly, then got stunned by an undermanned Heat team in the ECF. A result that stung.
- 2023–24 (64–18): The year it clicked. Best record in the league, dominant from wire to wire, swept Indiana, won it all. No asterisks.
- 2024–25 (61–21): A strong regular season on paper — second best in the East, top-five defense, record-setting three-point shooting. On the floor, still an elite team. On paper, a legitimate title contender heading into May.
Three consecutive top-two seeds in the East. A championship. Two Finals appearances in four years. By any measure, this is a franchise operating at a historically high level.
This Season: Good Until It Wasn't
The 2024–25 regular season was quieter than the championship run but still impressive. The Celtics went 61–21, second in the East only to Cleveland. Their defense ranked second in the league. They broke the NBA record for three-pointers made in a single season. All the pieces were there.
The first round went smoothly — Orlando dispatched 4–1, no real drama.
Then the Knicks happened.
Boston went into that second-round series as the presumptive favorite. What followed was an unraveling. They fell into a 0–2 hole before TD Garden had even gotten loud. And then, in Game 4, everything got worse: Jayson Tatum went down with a ruptured Achilles tendon. Season over. Surgery. The best player on the team — arguably the best player of his generation — sidelined in the cruelest way possible.
The Celtics lost the series 2–4. It wasn't even close by the end.
Year-Over-Year: The Contrast Is Stark
| Season | Record | How It Ended |
|---|---|---|
| 2020–21 | 36–36 | First round exit |
| 2021–22 | 51–31 | Lost in NBA Finals (vs. Golden State) |
| 2022–23 | 57–25 | Lost in ECF (vs. Miami) |
| 2023–24 | 64–18 | 🏆 NBA Champions |
| 2024–25 | 61–21 | Lost in 2nd Round (vs. New York) |
The regression is real, but it's not the whole story. Losing in the second round as the defending champion looks bad — and it is bad — but losing Tatum mid-series changes the narrative. This wasn't a team that got outplayed. This was a team that had its engine pulled out mid-drive.
What Comes Next
The Tatum injury is the question that swallows everything else. Achilles tears are survivable in the NBA — Kevin Durant did it, Klay Thompson did it — but recovery is long, typically a full calendar year, and nothing is guaranteed. Tatum won't be the same player in January as he was before the injury. Whether he gets back to that level is genuinely unknown.
The rest of the roster is solid. Brown is a proven number two who can lead a team through stretches. The depth is real. Mazzulla has proved he can coach.
But the window that opened in 2022 and peaked in 2024 might be closing — or at least pausing. The Celtics aren't rebuilding. They're not done. But the easy assumption that Boston is the team to beat in the East? That's gone now, at least until Tatum is back and healthy and looks like himself again.
Four years of elite basketball. One championship. A lot of close calls. And now, a long summer of uncertainty.
That's the Celtics right now. Still one of the best franchises in the league. Still a contender on paper. But somewhere between "dynasty" and "what could have been."
Championship windows are smaller than they look. Boston got one banner. Whether they get another depends on a guy in a rehab pool in Waltham.