At the All-Star break, it’s worth acknowledging something that felt unlikely just four months ago.

The Celtics are good, not just scrappy, feisty, or ahead of schedule — they’re all of those things too, don’t get me wrong.

They are in-your-face, out-in-the-open good.

At the not-quite-exact halfway point of the season, the Boston Celtics own the second-best record in the East. Fourth in offensive rating. Eighth in defensive rating. Third-best point differential in the league. Eleven wins in their last fourteen games. I’ll stop there, you get it. This isn’t smoke and mirrors.

If you predicted this exact outcome back in October, congratulations! The rest of us were bracing for something closer to transitional. Competitive, maybe. Entertaining, for sure. A development year while waiting for Jayson Tatum to return and the roster to settle into its next iteration.

Instead, the Celtics are forcing a different conversation.

In Boston, when a team starts looking like a contender, the expectations don’t stay modest for long. And now that we have a large enough sample to believe this is real, fans are reluctantly asking themselves – is it another championship or bust season for the Celtics?

A lot of my analysis is built on vibes, I’ll admit. So let’s strip away the aura and consider what the Celtics have done up through this point of the season by the numbers.

Through 54 games, the Celtics are 35–19. That’s a 53-win pace, only eight games off their 61-win total last year. Second in the East. Tied for fourth in the entire league. Their point differential suggests they’ve actually underperformed their record, with an expected mark closer to 38–16.

The offense? Fourth in the NBA in offensive rating. Third in three-pointers made. First in fewest turnovers.

The defense? Not elite by last year’s standard, but firmly in the top third of the league. Second in opponent points allowed per game. Top ten in defensive rating. They rebound better than they should for a team that plays small more often than not.

Since that 5–7 stumble in November, they’ve gone 30–12. That’s a 59-win pace over nearly three months.

This season was supposed to test whether Jaylen Brown could anchor an offense without Tatum shouldering that pressure. Instead of surviving that test, he’s thriving in it. The scoring leap is obvious, but the bigger shift is control. He’s dictating matchups, handling double teams way more calmly, and often defending the other team’s best player. When the Celtics need a bucket (or a stop), they know where it’s coming from.

Behind him, the role expansion has been everything you could hope for, and then some.

Payton Pritchard handled starter-level usage, then slid back into a sixth-man role without missing a beat. Despite the shooting inefficiency, Derrick White’s processing speed remains one of the quiet advantages of this team. Neemias Queta has stabilized the middle, while Sam Hauser continues to stretch the geometry of the floor. And when it’s time to bring in some combination of Jordan Walsh, Hugo Gonzalez, and/or Luka Garza, they’re actually winning their minutes, not losing them.

In other words, you don’t land in the top-five in net rating by accident. You don’t maintain a top-three offense for four months on good vibes alone. And you don’t bank 35 wins while missing a top-five player because you’re playing “harder” than everyone else.

Everything about this version of the Celtics says contender.

Whether we were ready to say that in October or not doesn’t really matter anymore.

Often the best indicator of how a team views their season is the moves they make around the trade deadline. If the Celtics were indeed in a gap year, we likely would have seen Brad Stevens sacrifice the present in favor of the future.

Instead, he made moves that did two things simultaneously: improve the present and protect the future.

The Nikola Vučević addition was a calculated move for the now. Brad went and acquired a floor-spacing big who can pass, rebound, and operate within the existing structure. Much like Kristaps Porzingis before him, Nikola Vučević’s playstyle largely fits next to Tatum, not just in his absence.

In his recent press conference, Stevens said repeatedly that flexibility matters, and the Celtics now have plenty of that. Because of the moves Boston made, they head into the summer with:

• Their own first-round pick
• A favorable second-round pick
• A full mid-level exception worth roughly $15 million
• Multiple trade exceptions, including one north of $27 million

This means Boston can sign a rotation-level free agent outright. Or they could absorb a contract in a trade without matching salary. It also means they can consolidate young pieces if the playoffs reveal a clear need, or they could simply let the already-blossoming internal growth keep compounding.

Brad didn’t panic-buy at the deadline or mortgage future assets chasing a headline. He reshaped the roster while preserving optionality.

When you layer those decisions on top of a potential Tatum return, the signs become too glaring to ignore. Whether anyone says “championship or bust” out loud or not, the standard in Boston tends to arrive on its own once the path becomes visible.

If this were still considered a gap year for the Celtics, I’d be writing about vibes and development and moral victories that feel nice before switching gears to Draft prep. But the Celtics have dragged the conversation somewhere more stressful: they’ve played well enough for long enough that you can’t pretend the ceiling is just “fun season.” 

The East is messy. The path is real. Boston has already banked the kind of résumé that forces you to take them seriously. Add Tatum back into the mix, and it becomes harder to justify moving the goalposts lower just because it was convenient in October.

So here’s the bar. Winning one round feels like a must. Making the conference finals feels like a fair expectation. And if you somehow end up back in the NBA Finals, well…anything can happen in a 7-game series.

The point is, the Celtics didn’t ask for these expectations. They earned them, and those of us that bleed green are lucky (and stressed) because of it.