Will we see Top-5 Tatum in the preseason?

Fair enough.

Um, no, but, but, but all seriousness, I mean, the, the Celtics this year, I, I think the biggest thing for them in the preseason is just seeing if guys got any better.

I mean, th- this team, you, you kinda know what guys been able to do.

They, they don't have that many guys who are huge mysteries as far as what they can do.

But are the guys that aren't named Jayson Tatum and Derrick White and Payton Pritchard, are those other guys, are they any better? I think about a guy like Jordan Walsh.

Can he do some things now better than he did last year? Same thing with Baylor Shannon, who I think he might be, you know, one of those guys that if there's gonna be a breakout guy from among the, the non-core guys, he's probably gonna be that guy.

It, it sounds as though he's gonna get a legitimate shot at being more impactful.

Uh, and you start going down the line and, and looking at this roster, for them to have any shot at meeting what I think are expectations that are still pretty high, even though they obviously, the Jaylen Brown departure is a big one, they're gonna need some guys to step up and do some things that we have not seen them do up to this point.

And training camp, preseason is where you start to see kind of the, the beginnings of those type of g- uh, growth improvements from last year to now.

I think that I'm gonna be watching just the chemistry, like Sharrod said, but also just kinda the rotations, how guys work well together, work together on the court.

With a guy like Mitchell Robinson, Paul George, and Mike Conley, those are the three guys that we're looking for, the newcomers.

How they all work with Jayson, how they work, uh, their way on both sides of the ball offensively and def- defensively.

Is there gonna be more of a responsibility? Uh, are they gonna look for guys like Mamas Кита? Is he gonna have more offensive responsibility? Uh, is Derrick White, h- how comfortable does he look offensively? Um, a lot of the questions from last year.

Uh, the Philadelphia series was a painful one.

They lost that series.

Uh, but I think a lot of guys, obviously they made a chase to, to move Jaylen, uh, to Philadelphia.

But a lot of guys, I think, who are still here had a lot of, like Sharrod said, improvements to make for this team to reach another level, for this team to be competitive with the likes of the Knicks and the 76ers, um, and other teams that are looking pretty good so far in this early preseason.

So Pr- Payton Pritchard, Derrick White, Sam Hauser, you're looking for- Noticeable improvement, noticeable changes, uh, in all their games.

Now you're not, you know, there's been people, uh, players who've had great pre-seasons [laughs] and didn't have good regular seasons and vice versa.

So you're not judging too much off of that, but you just wanna see the confidence, you wanna see the teamwork, you wanna see all of what they've worked on over the last 10, 12 days, uh, kind of come to fruition.

Especially, um, you know, with so much riding on this season, I think there's a lot of, uh, I don't know if it's pressure, but just definitely the changes.

And people are looking at Boston, seeing, "Okay, what are you guys gonna do, uh, now that you guys made this big trade? What are you guys...

How are y- how good is Boston gonna be? Are they gonna take a step back?" Um, what's the impact of Joe Mazzulla? Is he g- you know, is he gonna back up a really good coaching job, coach of the year, with another coach of the year type performance? What about Tatum? Is he 100%? Um, what about, uh, you know, Derrick White? What about Pritchard, as we talked about? What about the bench crew? The Jordan Walches and the Baylor Scheiermans and Hugo Gonzalez and Roy Harper.

Uh, are they, do they have more in the bag? So, uh, I think a lot of questions, um, come up and we'll start to get, I don't know about answers, but we'll start to get an idea, uh, over the next couple days when they play Cleveland and then they come back and play 76ers.