Amen. If you read some of the posts in this thread, anyone who's negative about a team that all but admits they're not giving much effort is clearly a bandwagon Pats fan who has never rooted for a bad team and therefore is toxic and not a 'real fan'. Boston fans have always hated teams that played below their talent, didn't give their all every night, didn't seem to like each other very much, and just flat out weren't 'all in'. Even if they win a lot of games, it's just not what we want to see in our teams. We've always been this way.
People are down on this team for the same reasons--and by the same set of values--that they irrationally loved the 2015 and 2016 teams beyond what their records and real level of contention indicated. Those teams outperformed their talent level because they had a collective chip on their shoulder and made up the deficit in toughness, discipline, and camaraderie. So naturally, with this team being the exact opposite of that, the same group of fans dislikes this version of the team to a degree that goes beyond their record. This makes total sense to me, no idea why people like OP are continually mystified by it to the point that they think attacking the fanbase is a reasonable response.
Few things annoy me more about this sub than this continued insistence that you're not a 'real' fan if you demand that the team give a shit and try hard every night, and accordingly call them out when they don't. I'm pretty sure I was watching and rooting for the Celtics years before the average poster on this sub was born. Shit, my 60-year-old dad is far more critical of this team than I am, and he's a lifelong Celtics fan who coached high school basketball for 20+ years and probably once per week talks someone's ear off about how Kevin McHale is the most underrated player of the last 40 years. Some of the oldest, hardest-core Celtics fans I know are far more critical of this year's team than the vast majority of this sub, so I'm not sure what circles people here are running in that they think this sub is unusually negative.