he first day of training camp wasn't an event; it was an autopsy. The air in the film room was cold and still as Coach Joe Mazzulla clicked play on the final six minutes of Game 7 against the Knicks. There was no music, no preamble, just the grim, silent evidence of their collective failure projected on the large screen.
They watched the Celtics' offense, once a beautiful, flowing machine, degenerate into a series of desperate, stagnant isolations. They saw the defensive rotations slow by a fatal half-step. They saw the body language—the slumped shoulders, the averted eyes, the silent pleas for someone else to make a play.
Mazzulla let the final buzzer sound, then let the silence stretch for a full ten seconds, making every man in the room feel its weight.
