The Cupcake Method Will Never Work

The Cupcake Method Will Never Work

Trey: 1

Cupcake Lady: 0

*By the way, I’m really not sure what she’s good at beyond tweeting too much. Bake off? Coincidence that didn’t happen?*

The Boston Celtics were a historically great team last year. This year, that same group lost in six games during the second round to a Knicks team that they’re way better than on paper.

So what changed?

Everything that I’ve been saying for months.

The we’re good enough, let’s sing Kumbaya and pass out cupcakes method will never, ever work.

The failures of the 2024-25 Boston Celtics start and end with Brad Stevens. Frankly, I don’t want to hear about the Jayson Tatum excuse. Boston was going to be down 3-1 in that series prior to the injury. At the end of the day, the Knicks won because the hungry dog runs faster and the Eye of the Tiger in the Celtics locker room vanished.

Trey doesn’t do hindsight bias. It’s all in the video.

Fans in Boston should know better. Those Patriots teams with Bill Belichick never won because they had the most talent. They won because of culture. This is why we lift all them weights, sort of thing. The bottom line here with the Celtics is that they prioritized saving the owner money over winning. It’s not arguable unless you want to be a fanboy or cupcake fudge-packer about it.

The sins are undeniable. In fact, I’d argue that two of the last three offseasons were firable.

2023 included the Gallinari disaster, the stupid Brogdon trade, oh… and expecting Joe Mazzulla to take the reins as a first-year coach only to provide him zero staff to help. By the way, none of this is hindsight bias.

2024 was mostly a job well done, but there were a fair share of mistakes along the way including the biggest noob rookie mistake of all-time to take project Jordan Walsh on a win now team when he had zero chance to help the team in the near future. Oh, and the Jrue Holiday thing took an extreme stroke of luck where they otherwise would have been screwed and wouldn’t have won.

2025, Stevens went back to being a dope. Sorry, dope is the wrong word. I should say grew a clam between his legs and went Rocky 3 mode. Trading Jaden Springer epitomized everything wrong with the team. Winning wasn’t the priority. Saving the owner money was and that disease bled through the entire locker room.

I’d also argue that not having Alperen Şengün on this team is a total sin nobody talks about either, but that’s a much longer discussion that involves more context.

Even if that one is a tad unfair, the fact that not ONE draft pick is helping this current iteration of the Celtics from the Stevens regime is absolutely a sin. If the Celtics simply have one bench guy on this team who contributes instead of Jordan Walsh, they probably win this series. Turning the card in for Julian Strawther (or maybe even keeping the draft rights of Corey Kispert), who is doing those sorts of things for the Nuggets, was certainly an option. Who knows, maybe Jayson Tatum never gets hurt after going nuts in Game 4, but we’ll never know the answer to that for sure. It’s also not impossible that the karma gods made this happen in a trickle-down effect.

Brad Stevens Belongs In Jail

If Brad Stevens has any self-awareness, he will take ownership for the piss poor job he did over the last calendar year. If the fan base has any self-pride, they will follow suit. This season was lost because of bad leadership and an absence of culture. It’s the same reason the Red Sox continue to remain painfully average despite having all the necessary pieces to compete.

Instead of running and hiding, I challenge you to do the right thing and apologize. Except I’m well aware of how this goes…

The Cupcake Method will never ever work.

Brad Stevens isn’t a god. You only view him that way because you have no idea what someone who is actually educated could actually accomplish if they got one of these jobs. Red Auerbach isn’t proud, he’s disgusted and you’ve all pissed on his legacy. Shameful and embarrassing.

End of blog.

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