Kyrie Irving’s injury stinks, but the Celtics were playing for the future anyway

That the Boston Celtics’ season feels over at Game 79, and not Game 1, is the testament to them. When they lost their first two games and their star offseason signing to a horrible injury, it would have been easy to start dreaming of the fantastical next-season, one where injuries won’t happen, young players play like veterans, and perhaps where even the fearsome King of the East has departed for Western Conference pastures.

Boston didn’t, announcing an immediate “fuck you” to the injury gods by winning their next 16 games. But as Kyrie Irving joins Gordon Hayward with season-ending surgery — he’ll go under the knife Saturday to remove two screws left from a 2015 surgery, because they have bacterial infection — it does indeed feel like this season is over, in the sense that the team’s high expectations can’t possibly be met for now.

There’s intrigue, and the Celtics aren’t giving up, but this weakened team is a facsimile of what they could be one day soon.

This season was still brilliant. Brad Stevens may earn Coach of the Year for his work on the sidelines. Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown’s growth from day one kept breaking through all barriers. Terry Rozier turning into a folk hero was mesmerizing. Give Boston the right matchups, and perhaps Stevens’ guile and Al Horford’s defensive quarterbacking can garner the sheer will that Boston will need to overcome more talented opposition. Any dance likely ends beyond that, likely short of last year’s run to the Eastern Conference Finals.

Boston fans should be worried, somewhat, for their star point guard. Irving has now played 60 games or fewer in four of his seven seasons. He missed even more time during his one year at Duke, and this pending surgery is related to complications from his 2015 one. Even if this surgery is straightforward, the fact is that Irving’s injury history increasingly is not.

But it’s a single worry, one that is masked by many more certainties. Consider what a Celtics’ team should look like next season, with a healthy Irving and Hayward. They’ll expect progress from Tatum and Brown, perhaps into stardom. They’ll likely end up with another lottery pick in the next few years: three picks are owed to them, but each one has a complicated set of protections that makes it hard to predict precisely when they’ll fall into Boston’s hands.

LeBron James’ offseason decision will ripple across the whole league. Should he shift conferences, as has been rumored at length, then Boston’s path to the Finals looks much more appealing. We’ll see how legitimate the Toronto Raptors are this postseason, but their two best players are 32 and 28. That window isn’t open for five years.

A better challenger will be the Philadelphia 76ers. Boston and Philadelphia ought to be the league’s best rivalry over the next decade, assuming nothing goes catastrophically wrong.

Basketball fans should still feel bummed out, of course. We’ve seen Kyrie Irving in the postseason, and we’ve seen how special he can be. Boston is incomplete without Hayward, but they had beat both Cleveland and Toronto in the regular season this year. Stevens’ teams have done nothing but surprise. It sucks that the Celtics will have to compete — and they’ll damn sure compete — with even less star power than previously thought.

If this was bound to happen to Irving and those two screws in his knee eventually, though, it might as well be now. Him and Hayward can wear matching suits, and Marcus Smart too, although Smart’s suit might be a little off since his hotel room’s mirror is broken. (I’m kidding — it was a picture frame!) There’s no urgency to contend just yet, even if Boston would have liked to try to do just that this May, even without Hayward.

The asshole who invented injuries still won’t be welcome at any social function I attend, but Irving’s setback feels more like an obnoxious detour on Boston’s path to becoming a mainstay atop the East, not a blown engine that will prevent them from getting there. We should all hope, for basketball’s sake, that the notion proves true.