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Too Much Talent? Kyrie Irving On Why Boston Struggles

Last year’s Boston Celtics had been one of the biggest success stories of the 2017-18 NBA season.

A young team that lost both their All Stars, Gordon Hayward and Kyrie Irving ,who both underwent season-ending surgeries, made the Conference Finals nontheless. Boston’s young core (Tatum, Brown, Rozier) played brilliantly and made the fans almost forget about Irving and Hayward.

This season, with the two stars healthy and playing again, everyone expected the Celtics to be the East’s top dog and a contender. But in reality, the team is struggling. They are currently only  5th in the east with a 9-7 record. Not alarmingly bad, but certainly worse than expected.

Can there be something such as too much talent on a team? Are there too many potentially great players taking each other’s minutes? With the bar set extremly high, and everyone expecting great performances on the daily of the young players, their own achievements from last year, are actually working against them at the moment. That’s part of Kyrie Irving’s theory on why the team has been underachieving. That’s what he told Jay King of The Athletic.

“I think last year, the young guys that are in the locker room now, some of the guys that are playing, they were a little bit younger. They weren’t expected to do as much and I think that the amount of pressure that we put on them to perform every single night is something that they have to get used to, like being part of a great team like this. If you’re not playing to the standard then as a team we just don’t all click. I think once we get there and we find that consistency then we’ll be great.”

But much like Irving said, I don’t have many doubts that the Celtics won’t figure it out soon. They’re too great of a team and it’s only a matter of time until they’re great again.