About a year ago, I wrote an article in this publication headlined, “National lessons from the unserious 2022/23 Boston Celtics”. In it, I argued that, much like the supremely talented Boston Celtics of the 2022/23 NBA season, if we, as a society, do not cultivate the right societal habits and do not walk the talk when we say we are committed to things like structural and institutional reform, then when we need those habits the most, we will fail to find them because we do not practise them enough.
A year later, the 2023/24 Boston Celtics have won the NBA Championship, beating the Dallas Mavericks in the NBA Finals by four games to one. The Celtics had a truly dominant season from the start to end, finishing 64-18 in the regular season (for benchmarking purposes, the mark of a good team is usually 50+ wins), and 16-3 in the playoffs (this puts them in elite company; for instance, the 1995/96 Chicago Bulls led by Michael Jordan went 15-3 in the NBA playoffs).
Given their bounce back from bitter failure the season before, it is only appropriate that I share some lessons for Malaysia from what I call the (finally) serious 2023/24 Boston Celtics. The first is to have the willingness to improve the team even at the expense of personal relationships. In the summer of 2023, Celtics president of basketball operations Brad Stevens traded for Kristaps Porzingis and Jrue Holiday, two players who would be integral to the championship run. Porzingis was a 7ft 3in (2.21m) sharpshooter who could also protect the rim, while Holiday was an all-purpose utility guard who was known as one of the best defensive players in the NBA.
But in doing so, he traded a bunch of players who had essentially grown up with the team; players who the Celtics themselves drafted. In particular, the Celtics traded away Robert Williams and, especially, Marcus Smart, who was known as the heart and soul of the Celtics. Smart was seen as the team’s emotional anchor (for better or worse) and, in fact, had won the NBA Defensive Player of the Year in 2022. The departure of Smart left many Celtics fans heartbroken, myself included. But it was undeniable at that time, and even more so now that the pudding has been eaten, that the trades made the Celtics better. For national policy, just imagine how much more accomplished we might be if policy choices can be made with a much heavier weightage on what’s best for the country versus on what long-standing relationships may dictate.
The second lesson from these Celtics is that in a team sport, having the best team matters more than having the best individual players. In the NBA Finals, the Dallas Mavericks unquestionably had the best individual player, a Slovenian phenom named Luka Doncic. Some “pundits” had even argued that the Mavericks had the second-best player in the series, a guard named Kyrie Irving (they were wrong). And so, many so-called experts predicted that the Mavericks would beat the Celtics in the finals, because Doncic and Irving had led the Mavericks through a brutal Western Conference, while the Celtics eased through the Eastern Conference (more on this later).
But in a team sport, having the best team matters most. And most of the time, the best players make their team the best team, but it’s not necessarily a given. If that were true, Lionel Messi would have won every World Cup since 2010 or so. The Celtics won because they had an unselfish team who were as invested in each other’s success as they were in their own. Jayson Tatum, one of the team’s stars said as much: “I want for my teammates what I want for myself. I want everybody to shine.” It was a truly egalitarian team in terms of credit-sharing, a rarity in a very me-first society.
For Malaysia to achieve the kind of success we want to achieve, be it in terms of economic growth, or attracting investment, or even moving up relatively meaningless things like some competitiveness index, it will require coordinated efforts. The government or nation that ultimately capitalises best on global opportunities is not necessarily the ones with the best executives, but those who are most coordinated. Every time we hear something like, “Oh, we can’t do this; this is another agency’s responsibility” or a “Why are you giving my turf to someone else?”, it moves us backwards.
The third lesson is that, when it comes to building habits, the process may be way more important than the outcome. The outcome of any NBA game, or even any NBA series, is pretty binary. You either win or you lose. And entire overreactions can happen based on that incredibly binary outcome (guilty!). But as Celtics head coach Joe Mazzulla argued on a podcast, when they analysed the 2022/23 season, they realised that where the team struggled was in a few gameplay sequences in a given game here and there, but struggling in those sequences led to an overall loss.
And so, instead of completely overreacting to the binary outcome, the Celtics focused on getting better at those sequences. They made the trades they made, but they reworked their offensive and defensive games to improve on those sequences. Yet, at the same time, they kept true to the good habits that come from having strong fundamentals. Mazzulla said the Celtics would never win the title if the players “don’t run back on defence, rebound, execute and get to your spacing”. For policy, it is important to remember that we can never really control the outcomes of choices we make, but the process — and the habits we build in the process — matters. Making data-driven decisions, communicating well, improving execution capacity and being less turfy ... all of these things will eventually add up to outcomes we desperately crave.
The fourth lesson comes from the third one. Since outcomes are out of our control, luck matters a lot. The Celtics ran through an Eastern Conference against opponents whose key players got injured. But you can only play whoever’s in front of you. You still have to seize it by building the right habits and having the right processes. The global geopolitical situation, coupled with a rising inflationary macroeconomic environment means Malaysia has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to retool its economy. Lady Luck is smiling on us now, even relative to our competitors, we must seize the day.
Finally, the fifth and perhaps most important lesson is that persistence matters. The Celtics had been knocking on the Championship door for years, making the Conference Finals (semifinals) in five of the previous seven seasons, and one NBA finals. They finally broke through in 2024. Now, for Malaysia, if we really believe in the reforms or the development goals we wish to achieve, we have to hold fast, keep to the process, stay coordinated as a team, be willing to choose what’s right over who’s who and understand that nation-building is a never-ending journey.