Forsberg: It's Time To Reevaluate Expectations For The 2025-26 Celtics

Forsberg: It's time to reevaluate expectations for the 2025-26 Celtics originally appeared on NBC Sports Boston

How soon is too soon to call off the “gap year”? 

With Jayson Tatum out indefinitely due to a ruptured Achilles tendon and four core members of their 2024 championship squad on new teams, most assumed the Boston Celtics would fade to the NBA’s background in 2025-26. Maybe they’d make a push for a spot in the play-in tournament, but with a trimmed-down roster featuring plenty of new faces, this seemed like an opportunity to hit the reset button and focus on preparing for a bounce-back season in 2026-27 with Tatum back in the fold.

After Tuesday’s thrilling victory over the New York Knicks at TD Garden, however, the Celtics have won seven of their last nine games to improve to 12-9 at the quarter mark of the 2025-26 season. And as Celtics insider Chris Forsberg noted on Tuesday night’s Celtics Talk Podcast, it’s fair to wonder whether we’ve undersold this Boston team.

“It’s time to re-evaluate expectations,” Forsberg said on Celtics Talk. “We came into the season, and understandably there was this idea that we needed temper expectations — that it might be a year where a draft pick would be the most valuable thing. We knew there would be some ups and downs, and an 0-3 start certainly hammered that home.

” … But even I have to admit, a lot of the younger players have exceeded a lot of what I thought was possible. And now as we stand in early December with every Jayson Tatum Snapchat video that he puts out showing him doing some new move that I can’t even do with two full Achilles tendons, I’m left to think, ‘Oh my gosh, this team is very good.’

“They just completed a five-game stretch in which they beat the Pistons, the Cavs, the Knicks and the Magic, which in my mind are the four best teams in the Eastern Conference.”

To Forsberg’s point, the Celtics have played very well against elite competition: They have seven wins against teams .500 or better (tied for second-most in the NBA), and they’re 6-3 against the top six teams in the East. While Jaylen Brown is playing like a fringe MVP candidate (29.0 points, 6.0 rebounds and 4.8 assists per game), the C’s also have gotten surprisingly strong contributions from young role players like Jordan Walsh and Josh Minott.

The season is very young, of course, and Boston’s margin for error is very slim. If Brown, Derrick White or Payton Pritchard are forced to miss extended time, things could go south in a hurry.

But there’s also a world in which this Celtics team continues its upward trajectory and sets itself up to be a legitimate threat in the East whenever Tatum comes back.

“If the Celtics are healthy — if Derrick White, who has for small pockets of games pulled himself out of whatever random funk that he’s in for the start of the season, and Payton Pritchard, who has his moments where he just doesn’t have it on certain nights — if those guys all start just fully going, and you’re getting this from Walsh and Hugo [Gonzalez] and [Neemias] Queta … the Boston Celtics are not a play-in team,” Forsberg said.

“They’re not a lottery team. They are a legit playoff team, and the sort of team that, especially if Jayson Tatum is back out there … the Eastern Conference is not going to want to see these Boston Celtics.”