The Magic Number
Plus: I was wrong about Nikola Jokić
The Celtics shot .377 from three-point range this season. That's an incredible mark, but in order to average that mark, it means there were a number of games where they shot much worse. There were 15 games during the regular season in which they shot worse than 30% from three-point range. Seven of those 15 times were grouped in a 14-game stretch from Dec. 12th through Jan. 9th, and the stretch started after what was possibly the worst loss of the regular season on Dec. 10th in Golden State.
Following that stretch, it only happened five times in the season's final 41 regular season games, and it didn't happen in any of their first 14 playoff games either. But it happened the last two games.
Usually, the C's had an answer:
As you can see, in the following game, the C's usually snapped back to their usual form. In three of the 15 games, they had a second really bad game, and those three games are highlighted in green. That's where the C's find themselves tonight. In two of those three instances, they didn't have a resounding response, but in one of them they hit more than half of their threes. But on the whole, their cold stretch of shooting didn't last long. And if you wanted to remove the three back-to-back games from the right-hand column because it feels like double counting, that .382 percentage jumps to .409.
Of course, the playoffs are a different beast. At The Boston Globe today, Julian Benbow did a great job of illustrating one of the big reasons the C's are struggling from 3. tl;dr Miami's 2-3 zone really disrupts what the Celtics want to do, and even when they're solving it, it's leading to fewer threes going in the hoop.
Having said that, a) the C's have missed a lot of wide-open jumpers the past two games, and b) they should be capable of making adjustments with three games of video tape under their belts. So we'll see. We'll see if they even have the fight in them to make adjustments and compete tonight, but if they do, this "game after" three-point shooting stat could just be the magic number.
I Was Wrong about Nikola Jokić
I'll be honest with you – I don't like Nikola Jokić. I don't like his demeanor on the court. I don't like how he pretends to not care about his statistics or his awards. I don't like how he bullies people, like when he got ejected for swiping at Cameron Payne in the playoffs two years ago, or how he trucked Markieff Morris from behind for practically no reason. Dude has a temper. He generally gets a pass from the media and the refs for it, because he's a big dude and an MVP. But I've seen it time and again. I don't care for it.
Because of those feelings, I have doubted his skill at every turn, both publicly and privately. And while I do think the West was as soft as it has been in recent memory, that matters not a bit in the end. The Nuggets won the Western Conference, and went 12-3 while doing so. That's as dominant as dominant gets, and after long claiming that Jokić would never win anything of importance, I am here to admit that I was dead wrong. Even if all they did was beat the 4, 7, and 8 seeds, they still beat them, and they are rightfully the favorites to win the NBA title.