Would the Christmas Slate Have Been Better With the Celtics?

As a Celtics fan, this will be the first time you won’t be watching your team play basketball on Christmas Day since 2015.

Christmas has been the NBA’s showcase day since 1947, and their premier franchise in green has been a part of that tradition almost the entirety of its nearly 80-year run.

But ahead of the 2025-26 season, the NBA kept Boston off of its five-game slate for the 25th. With Jayson Tatum out rehabbing his torn Achilles and a huge chunk of the core of the team changing over this summer, the league deemed the Celtics unworthy of the marquee.

Fast-forward to today, and Boston might be one of the best storylines league-wide, sitting in the No. 3 seed in the Eastern Conference with a 18-11 on the back of Jaylen Brown playing at an MVP level.

In hindsight, you have to imagine the league wishes they would have had Boston playing in that early window game against the Knicks (20-9) instead of Cleveland (17-14), but hindsight’s 20/20. There was no way to truly know what the Celtics were going to be able to cook-up without Tatum.

With that said, there’s an argument to be made that the NBA ought to have Boston be a mainstay in that window, like the NFL has with the Lions and Cowboys on Thanksgiving.

But as the third game of the day comes to a close, I got to thinking:

Would today’s NBA slate have been better with the Celtics in the mix?

Let’s utilize that hindsight again here, and talk about the Knicks-Cavaliers game.

With my family being a bunch of Rhode Islanders, we were locked in on watching Tyler Kolek have one of the best games he’s had as a pro during his team’s riveting 126-124 win at Madison Square Garden. Kolek is from one town over from where I live, so he’s an easy guy to rally behind, even if he’s wearing the rival-Knicks uniform.

With how fun that game was, I’m going to go ahead and say the league didn’t need to change this game. We, again, have the benefit of hindsight here, and that game was awesome.

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This was one of two games I was focused on for the Celtics possibly being a replacement opponent, because the league typically likes to have rivalry-type games in these windows where possible.

That means the Celtics would likely only ever play one of three opponents: the 76ers (16-12), the Lakers (19-9) and the Knicks.

For the Lakers, they’re playing the Rockets (17-10) tonight in a game that tips off momentarily. And when you have the option of having LeBron James and the Lakers take on Kevin Durant and the Rockets, you’re going to do that every single time.

With that said, I’ll go ahead and say this, too, is a game where the league didn’t need to make a switch.

For the 76ers, they were sort of in the same boat as the Celtics coming into this season. With Joel Embiid’s 2024-25 being cut short due to injury, there were a ton of questions surrounding this team, given the fact that they finished 24-58 last year with arguably their best player sidelined.

So when the NBA schedule makers got together this summer, you can understand why they wouldn’t want to match-up a 24-win 76ers team with a Celtics team that was going to have to navigate a season without Tatum. Add in the unknown of Embiid, and it was a no-brainer to leave them off the slate.

To bring hindsight back into again - both the 76ers and Celtics have been performing above expectations, and would have made for a fun matchup. Tyrese Maxey is right there with Brown as a fringe MVP guy. With that said, I can’t sit here and tell you that game would have been more fun than what we got at MSG today, and there’s no universe where it would have knocked any of these Western Conference matchups out of the later window slates.

The only other option here would be subbing a Celtics matchup in against one of their non-traditional rivals, say the Magic (17-13) or Heat (15-15), but I don’t think either one of those two teams from Florida has enough star power at the moment to carry an NBA Christmas window.

My conclusion:

While I would have liked to watch the Celtics today, nothing about today’s slate feels like it should have changed.

Hopefully we’ll see you next year!

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Tom Carroll is a contributor for Roundtable, with boots-on-the-ground coverage of all things Boston sports. He's a senior digital content producer for WEEI.com, and a native of Lincoln, RI.