Last season’s Boston Celtics were a team suffering from excess. They were a team with a truckload of talent, but never quite found a way to coexist and ultimately collapsed under the weight of their own significant expectations. While the team’s substantial roster crunch caused a plethora of very prominent issues, one player struggled through his own lack of opportunity in relative obscurity: Semi Ojeleye.
The same injury that brought Ojeleye an opportunity to establish himself as an NBA talent in his first season ultimately took away those opportunities in his second. Gordon Hayward’s return to the Celtics lineup essentially capped out their ability to play any more wings: behind Hayward, Jayson Tatum, Jaylen Brown and Marcus Morris, there just wasn’t an opportunity for Ojeleye to crack the rotation.