Motivation and the perfect record

Looking back over the years at the won-loss record of the Boston Celtics and it is plainly obvious that this franchise has had an embarrassing record of futility. THEY HAVE NEVER HAD AN UNDEFEATED SEASON!!! Imagine?? How Mortifying! All these seasons and they have suffered double digit losses every year.

Some typical won-loss records over the years:

1958-59 52-20
1959-60 59-16
1960-61 57-22
1961-62 60-20
1980-81 62-20
1981-82 63-19
1982-83 56-26
1985-86 67-15

Teams with Bill Russell and Bob Cousy, later with Larry Bird and Dennis Johnson, and they lost all those games! How could such an unnatural disaster have happened? What would Arnold Auerbach have said?

As it happens, Auerbach did have something to say about this subject, in On and Off the Court:

“Motivation! Getting your people to give you their best efforts. Night in and night out. Game in and game out. Motivation, that was the key. Looking for reasons to win. You have to do that when you play as many games as pro teams do, particularly if you’ve got a good team and you’re playing against a weaker opponent. Sounds like that should be a cinch, right? Far from it.

“. . . You have to motivate your players for the so-called easy games. The big games take care of themselves, they’re self-motivating to a large extent. It’s the game that catches you off-balance in which you’ve got to bust your humps.”

So there you have it. If one was kind-hearted and generous, instead of faint-hearted and self-flagellating, one might say that the Celtics have a decent record so far this year, they’ve played hard, rarely taken a night off. But noooo. Not some Celtics fans. They demand perfection - not to win games by a point, but to blow out every opponent. Just like the old days – not the way they were but the way they should have been.

but Spike

I could have swore we never lost a game before last week.

Nice post!

beat

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