The Boston Celtics are the darlings of many an online gambling establishment, including but not limited to BetNow.eu. But how did it all come about? It all started when Kyrie Irving’s Cleveland friends presented him with a rebuilt Chevrolet Nova for his birthday, so he decided that, rather than remain with the Cavaliers, he would drive all the way to Boston. Thus, when Channing Frye went to Kyrie’s house to pick him up, as he did every morning, he found that Kyrie was gone. Channing once told Kyrie, “You're sitting on a winning lottery ticket. It would be an insult to us if you're still around here in 20 years.” But before he left, he sent Tyronn Lue a note saying that he “had to go see about a girl,” to which Lue replied to himself, “son of a bi%$# stole my line.”

Things didn’t get off to a wicked good start, though; in the opening game of the season, Kyrie’s fellow new arrival Gordon Hayward broke his leg, which was left-pointing a direction legs don’t usually point to. At first Kyrie felt really bad and blamed himself, but Brad Stevens talked to Kyrie and told him, “It's not your fault. It's not your fault. It's not your fault. It's not your fault. It's not your fault. It's not your fault.” And like that, over and over again, until Kyrie had a breakthrough and realized, that it was, in fact, not his fault.

And that’s when the Celtics started rolling, winning, as of this writing, 14 games in a row, for a 13-2 league-best record. But the best part was when one night Kyrie and a few Celtics were walking by bar with a glass front and spots LeBron James sitting by the window with some friends. Kyrie pounds the glass to get LeBron’s attention. LeBron turns toward Kyrie. “Do you like apples?,” Kyrie asks. LeBron doesn’t get it.

“Do you like apples?,” Kyrie asks again. “Yeah?,” replies LeBron. Kyrie slams a piece of paper with the numbers 14-2 on it on the glass. “How do ya like them apples?!,” Kyrie says, and his friends erupt with laughter. True story.

So can the Celtics keep up this pace and become contenders? Let’s put it like this; they follow a predictable narrative arc, but Boston adds enough quirks to the journey – and the Celtics are loaded with enough powerful performances – that they remain an entertaining, emotionally rich team. And Kyrie Irving is not some kind of lovable curiosity; he's a smart man who knows he's smart but pulls back from challenges because he was beaten down once too often when he was in Cleveland. Here is a player who has four teammates who love and want to help him, and he's threatened by their help because it means abandoning all of his old, dysfunctional defense mechanisms. As Louis Armstrong once said, “there's some folks, that, if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.” This team is about whether Kyrie is one of those folks.