That's the narrative that's been attached to this team recently. Is it fair or outdated?
There's a term in NBA lexicon called "the treadmill of mediocrity." The gist of it is that teams that are good-but-not-great fall into a pattern of not being bad enough to get a great draft pick. Thus they can never get good enough to be an elite team and just get stuck in the middle. This is a reasonable fear and I'm sure that this can happen to some teams. However, I'm having trouble understanding why some people are associating it with the Celtics.