If you compare the age of the teams, I would bet (a little, not a lot) the Cs are the youngest by far.Yeah. Here's the list of teams with multiple all-stars:
Nets (Durant / Harden / Irving)
Clippers (Kawhi / George)
Lakers (LeBron / AD)
Sixers (Embiid / Simmons)
Suns (Booker / Paul)
Jazz (Mitchell / Gobert)
Celtics (Tatum / Brown)
The Celtics are the clear outlier. Everyone else is a top contender and they combine for a 196-90 (.685) record. Meanwhile, the Celtics are sitting here at 23-25 (.479). The supporting casts can't explain away all of that delta.
I think a lot of it is just being young. JB and JT have worked their butts off to improve their own game. However, in the NBA, that's not enough when you reach superstar status (and contracts). JB and JT now have to learn how to be the best versions of themselves while at the same time making players around them better.This feels like mostly a maturity issue for me. Reminds me of how Antoine referred to himself as a "veteran all-star" after being named to the team in his 2nd season. He then failed to make it for the subsequent 3 seasons. To put it simply, I don't think Tatum was ready to alpha dog a team. He looked very close to it in the bubble but he's regressed. I'm confident he'll eventually get there but there will be more growing pains than I was anticipating a few months ago.
One thing I think we can all agree on - JB and JT do not have a track record of making others better. I think they are getting better at this. Some lineup continuity would help (i.e., the time JT put up a perfect lob pass for TL but too bad it was Wagner on the receiving end and it didn't have a chance).
Some of this up to Brad but also some of it is up to JT/JB.