Two Big Celtics Takeaways from the Conference Finals and a Finals Prediction
The Conference Finals were a lot of fun. If the Timberwolves had been able to hang tough longer in Game 2, the West might have gone on for longer, but even though Minnesota lost Game 4, that was an incredible game and possibly the best of the postseason. Game 1 of the East Conference Finals is right up there as well, just from a "did I just watch that?" perspective. Overall, there weren't a lot of duds – Games 5 in New York felt over early, as did Game 3 in Minnesota and Game 5 in OKC. But the others, even when the score ended up lopsided, were close for three quarters or more. This is what the NBA wanted, and they must have a big smile on their faces this morning, despite NY being eliminated.
As the title of this newsletter is Green Tint, you can be sure I watched these games with an eye on what they meant for the Celtics, and over and over across these 11 games, I came away with two coalescing takeaways. The first is very simple and depressing. The second was avoidable, and will have ripple effects next season. Let's talk basketball!
Takeaway the First: The Celtics Were Completely Broken
It is natural to wonder how the Celtics would have fared against the Pacers had they beaten the Knicks. My friend Chad Finn said earlier in the week on BlueSky that he thought the Pacers would have won in 5. I don't think they would have even won a single game. The Celtics were completely broken physically by the start of the second round series against the Knicks, and they only won those two games because of sheer will and the Knicks' inattention to detail.
It's tempting to say that if the Celtics had just not blown two 20-point leads in Games 1 and 2 that they would have won the series, that they were the better team and deserved to win. It's just not reality. We have seen over and over and over again that 20-point leads mean absolutely nothing. It's time to start recalibrating how we think of leads. In the 2007-2008 season when the Celtics kicked off the new Big Three Era, NBA teams averaged 99.9 points per game. Eighteen seasons later, teams averaged 113.8 points per game. I couldn't tell you the direct translation to what a safe lead is, but given how quickly teams can score and how much more frequently every team scores, it feels like a lead isn't really safe until it gets to the high 20's. The C's generated plenty of those leads last season, but not this season. And in most cases, when they generated their 20-point leads against New York, they were very short-lived.
A healthy version of this Celtics team beats a healthy version of this Knicks team every single time. But the C's weren't healthy, and nothing was going to change that. Jayson Tatum had a wrist injury on top of tearing his Achilles. Jaylen Brown was playing on a knee that could require offseason surgery. Jrue Holiday missed three of the five first-round games with a strained hamstring. Kristaps Porzingis had what seemed like the plague. The Celtics proved this season they could withstand two starters being out or ineffective. But four? No team is really built for that, not when one of the main substitutes is on the cusp of his 39th birthday, and one of the others also hurts his ankle. This Celtics team was broken. It sucks, but it is precisely why you savor every championship. Winning the NBA Finals takes everything. Especially in today's NBA, with a longer postseason, and a game that combines more running and movement with added allowed physicality once the playoffs start.
The Celtics were basically DOA in the second round. Your mileage may vary on how much you blame that on the bad luck of drawing an uber-physical Orlando Magic team in the first round. A healthy Orlando team would have been the five seed this season, and likely will be in the mix for the four or five seed with the Celtics (behind Cleveland, Indiana, and New York) next season. I think it's well past time to let the one and two seeds pick their first-round opponent. There's no chance the Celtics would have chosen Orlando. Assuming Cleveland picked Miami, the Celtics absolutely would have chosen Milwaukee or Detroit (I'd have chosen Milwaukee, personally). And all of Boston's problems were magnified because Celtics coach Joe Mazzulla kept his rotation far too short.
Takeaway the Second: The Celtics Didn't Play Enough Guys
The thing that had me frothing with jealousy watching all four teams in the Conference Finals was how many guys each team played. Every single team had at least one deep bench player step up.
In the first 11 games of the postseason for Oklahoma City, Kenrich Williams played just 38 minutes, and didn't really positively impact the game in any of them. And then he calmly stepped off the bench in Game 1 of the Conference Finals and drilled all three of his shots, including two dagger three's that helped irrevocably swing the momentum to OKC.
For the Timberwolves, it was Terrence Shannon Jr. He had not played more than seven minutes in any of his postseason action prior to Game 3 in Minnesota. And then he came off the bench and poured in 15 points on the way to the Timberwolves womping the Thunder by 42 points, much of those points coming in the pivotal second quarter in which Minnesota built a 30+ point lead. He played so well that he earned more minutes in Games 4 and 5, and was a positive force in those games as well. After Game 3, people joked that he wouldn't score another 15 points in the postseason, but he did – nine in Game 4 and 11 in Game 5. All of that was far from a given seeing as how the rookie Shannon only played in 32 regular-season games, but I think the TWolves would be justified in entering the offseason believing he can be a regular rotation player next season.
In New York, Delon Wright and Landry Shamet hardly saw the floor at all this season, nevermind in the postseason. The team seemed content to live or die with Cameron Payne believing he had the green light to shoot every time he touched the ball and the fact that he was a sieve on defense. But then Tom Thibodeau decided defense really was their problem, and called upon these two deep bench players. For my part, I had wondered why Wright hadn't gotten more playing time. I have always liked Wright, and I don't understand why he has bounced around so much. No matter the reason, he didn't play a single second against Detroit, and just three minutes against Boston before playing at least nine minutes in the final four games of the Eastern Conference Finals. Shamet had played a little more often, but not by much, and the pattern was the same. The duo's defense was pivotal in those four games, and particularly in Game 5, when they helped shut down Tyrese Haliburton one game after he played a flawless game to give Indiana its 3-1 lead.
The Pacers play a lot of guys by design, but when they pulled Tony Bradley out of mothballs in Game 2, the near universal reaction (including myself) was, "Tony Bradley is on this team?" I had no idea, even though he had actually played in Games 3 and 4 vs. Cleveland in the round prior. He helped stabilize the paint for Indy in Game 2 when Thomas Bryant was having a really bad night, and that allowed the Pacers to pull away with an important win. Bradley's effectiveness was muted in the following three games, but he did what he could until he hurt his hip in Game 5.
Bryant would redeem himself in Game 6. He had played well throughout the postseason – particularly in Game 5 vs. Cleveland when he shot four-for-six from the field – being the ideal backup center for Indy. But in the first two games against the Knicks, things went poorly. Mitchell Robinson put it on him, and he was a playoff worst -11 in Game 1, and then -9 in Game 2. He would not see the floor in Games 3 and 4. But after Bradley got hurt, he was going to be counted on in Game 6, and he delivered, knocking down three wide-open corner 3's that the Knicks refused to guard. And he wasn't the final deep bench guy who made an impact, as Jarace Walker also came in in Games 5 and 6 after Bradley got hurt to deliver 20 total solid minutes of play. He will likely have a similar role in the NBA Finals.
Contrast these efforts with how Celtics coach Joe Mazzulla ran the C's. I basically begged Mazzulla to leave Kristap Porzingis on the bench in Game 6 vs. the Knicks. He refused. Porzingis was a -12 in 12 minutes in Game 5 and a -14 in 11 minutes in Game 6. That's hard to do! There's just no way Neemias Queta would have been worse. I'll believe that to my grave. Mazzulla did not have the courage to play Queta, instead stubbornly standing by his compromised starter.
He did the same thing with Al Horford. Al Horford played at least 32 minutes in seven of the 11 postseason games. Three of the four he didn't were blowouts – Game 1 vs. Orlando, and then Games 5 and 6 vs. New York. He put up 10+ shots just twice in that span, with the second time – a 2-for-11 stinker in Game 2 vs. New York – proving fatal. This was a problem all season. One of the keys to the 2023-2024 championship had been ramping Horford down from 30.5 minutes per game in 2022-23 to 26.8 last season. But this season, instead of ramping him down further like they should have, Horford's minutes went back up, to 27.7 per game. And then he averaged 31.6 in the playoffs. It was beyond inexcusable.
Baylor Scheierman had played more minutes down the stretch of the regular season, seemingly in the hopes of ramping him up in the playoffs. And then, poof, nothing. Torrey Craig was signed with an eye on the postseason, and then poof, nothing. Xavier Tillman Sr. had been acquired last season for the same purpose last season, and had long since been mothballed. I didn't particularly mind that decision, but the bottom line is that Mazzulla and his short rotations were the outlier here. It's fine to keep the rotations short when everything is working as planned. But the four teams that reached the Conference Finals proved that they were capable of being creative when things weren't working, and their boldness stands out in very stark contrast to how Mazzulla managed his rotation this postseason. This will need to change next season.
Looking Ahead to the NBA Finals
Oklahoma City should be the resounding favorites in the NBA Finals. Indiana got a lot of easy buckets off of a slow New York team that couldn't or wouldn't get back on defense. That won't happen against OKC. OKC also won't be as sloppy with the ball as the Knicks were.
The Pacers do line up well defensively against OKC. Pascal Siakam can guard Chet Holmgren, Myles Turner can guard Isaiah Hartenstein, Aaron Nesmith can guard Jalen Williams, Tyrese Haliburton can guard Lugentz Dort, and Andrew Nembhard can guard Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. This last matchup is fascinating to me, because as they are both members of the Canadian national team, there's a better than decent chance that Nembhard has spent a lot of time guarding SGA in practices and scrimmages. Nembhard does a great job of staying down and not biting on pump fakes, as he showed in last night's Game 6, when he got six steals (and it felt like more) guarding Jalen Brunson. He'll need to be that good again and SGA, and certainly can be.
The big unknown for me, comes on the other side of the ball – who guards Tyrese Haliburton, and how effective can they be at that. My guess is that Cason Wallace is going to draw the bulk of the assignment, with Jalen Williams and SGA drawing the assignment as well. The only problem there is that Wallace isn't a starter. If Dort gets the initial matchup and Haliburton torches him, will Thunder coach Mark Daigneault adjust and start Wallace instead? Haliburton does a lot of dancing and running, and Dort and Alex Caruso are most effective when they're defending players who are a little more stationary.
Someone mentioned last night on BlueSky that Caruso figures to draw Pascal Siakam more, and I think that's accurate. I also think that will go poorly for him, because Siakam is more comfortable pulling up in the midrange than most. So I think the real key will be how OKC defends Haliburton.
It's tempting to say that if Haliburton can bend OKC's defense that the Pacers have a puncher's chance in this series. But I don't think it is so. It is also tempting to say that if the games are officiated properly that the Pacers stands a puncher's chance. But I don't think it is so. We have yet to see the refs rein in SGA falling down on one out of every three shots he takes, and we have yet to see the refs consistently rein in the hacking that Caruso, Dort, and Wallace (to say nothing of Hartenstein, SGA, and Williams) do on every. single. possession. Perhaps it will be different under the microscope of the Finals. Perhaps the league will finally realize that these two large elements of OKC's game are not entertaining to watch, and will ref the games accordingly. But I've given up hope on that front, at least for this season. And I don't think Indiana has enough answers if Aaron Nesmith is still hurt or for the games when Haliburton and/or Siakam go quiet. As much as it pains me, and as much as I will root for it to be wrong, I'll say Thunder in 5.