With the playoffs come and gone, Celtics fans know that banner 18 will not be raised to the rafters at the start of next year.

This year was a lot different than last year was. We didn’t get home court advantage throughout the playoffs, we lost both times this year to the Lakers, Cleveland looks like they will take it all, and we lost to Orlando, The reason why we lost in my opinion is becaue we didn’t have Kevin Garnett. 

Now I’m not going to lie, I was concerned because I knew that the Celtics had already played there best basketball.

When they went on that 19 game win streak they looked good, and pretty much unstoppable. However they haven’t gotten back to that point. They needed to get back to that status before the playoffs.

We needed to overcome Kevin Garnett’s knee. He was out for a while, and coach Doc Rivers only played him a certain amount of minutes when he dressed. This only suggested that he was not 100 percent.

 I don’t care what Doc said about how he wanted to ease him back into play, Without the “Big Ticket” out there the Celtics were’nt the same team. He just brings to much too the table, game in and game out. Not to mention his presence on the court as well as in the locker room. In order to repeat we needed him back. 

The past couple months we have seen the C’s take some hits with injuries. It seems like Tony Allen is injured every season for like half the year, and Brian Scallabrine is probably going to die if he gets another concussion, but I tought the C’s could press on without them.

 The one beside Garnett I’m concerned about is Leon Powe. Leon was a force in last year’s NBA Finals, and was a player we could have really use down the stretch. Like I stated earlier we just need to try to get back up to where we were earlier in the year, and start playing good basketball.

As far as home court goes, I wasn’t not too concerned. I thought if we could get healthy the pieces would fall into place, and we would be hanging up banner 18 at the start of next year.

 But it all comes down to staying healthy. KG wasn’t able to play 3/4 of every playoff game. Our chances at winning another one all centered around the big guy. He held the key to a repeat.