Boston Celtics' 'six starters' meeting kicked off hot start - ESPN

WITH JUST A few days before the start of the regular season — and as the Boston Celtics were still coming to grips with an offseason full of roster turnover that continued right up to the start of training camp — Jayson Tatum decided it was time to have a conversation.

The Celtics had, just a few weeks earlier, acquired Jrue Holiday the day before camp opened Oct. 3, bringing in one of the league's best two-way guards who had been a pillar of Boston's biggest rival in the Eastern Conference, the Milwaukee Bucks.

But while Boston celebrated his arrival, he brought with him plenty of questions. The Celtics had spent the summer planning to use a clear starting five: Tatum, Jaylen Brown, Al Horford, Derrick White and Kristaps Porzingis, who came to the Celtics in the first massive move of the team's summer back in June.

With Holiday now in the fold, the Celtics had six starting-quality players — and only five spots to put them in, meaning one of them wouldn't be introduced as a starter, and one would be sitting on the pine in the closing minutes of games.

Both topics quickly were injected into the bloodstream in Boston, with plenty of fans and those in the media opining about how it should go. But rather than letting it fester, and allowing one of the league's biggest unanswered questions to spiral into a narrative, Tatum gathered his five teammates in a room at the team's practice facility — without any coaches, or anyone else. He wanted to address the obvious elephant in the room.

«I wanted us to get in the room and talk about it,» Tatum told ESPN. «We all are human and have feelings, and I opened the floor and basically said, 'There's six of us. Only five can play at one time. One of us is not going to finish the game all