If there’s a theme song for this season, it’s Get Here (If You Can) by Oletta Adams. Just picture her standing at the fourth spot in the standings singing...
“You can reach me by starting Time Lord, you can reach me with offensive boards
You can reach me with a switching scheme, you can reach me with some zone
You can reach me playing Tacko Fall, sit on your timeouts or use them all
I don't care how you get here, just get here if you can.”
And so the Celtics, facing an explosive but not very good Minnesota Timberwolves team, managed to climb out of their own filth and folly to scrape together an overtime win, taking another small, sloppy step towards the overall goal.
“I didn’t think our starters played great out of the gate ... I don’t think our full starting five has played as well as they want,”
Brad Stevens
said after the game. “But I think obviously
Tristan (Thompson)
has given us a lot off the bench. I think
Grant (Williams
has) been good off the bench.
Payton (Pritchard)
made a couple big plays. So we were going to mix it up”
Thankfully for the Celtics,
Jayson Tatum
was able to get himself going to drop a 53-piece to bail them out. They ended up winning four out of seven games in this crucial homestand, neither seizing an opportunity to separate themselves in the standings nor tripping their way further down.
The Celtics, perhaps the unluckiest team in the league, are actually fortunate when it comes to the standings. Throughout this all, they are
still
only a game out of fourth. Somehow, with 19 games left, nothing has changed in the standings.
What is changing is how the Celtics look and how they react. They were beaten up by the New York Knicks but still won. They soiled themselves against a bad team again but they managed to win that game too. It’s the most incremental progress, but it’s progress nonetheless.
"We're playing and finishing them out. Staying the course,” Marcus Smart said. “We had some plays that could really have turned for us and we couldn't win down the road and we've been going down. We just decided and just continued to talk and I think tell one another that we gotta continue to keep going and just keep fighting through whatever adversity is in front of us."
There’s a whole lot of adversity on the way this week, starting with a buzzsaw of a Denver Nuggets team on Sunday afternoon. One difference between this road trip and the previous trips on the schedule is the lack of back-to-back games, which means
Kemba Walker
should be available for all of the games. In fact, the next back-to-back isn’t for two weeks.
“We get continuity, hopefully, knock on wood, right?” Stevens said. “It'd be nice to have
Evan (Fournier)
, because he's going to play a huge role for us if we're going to achieve and reach our best, but it is nice to say, 'OK, we know generally who is going to be playing when, what our rotation looks like.' It may change by a person or two here or there, depending on matchups, but for the most part, when we can start that group and we know who we need to bring off the bench and we have some healthy bodies you do feel like you can make progress instead of fighting, scratching and clawing to get the result.”
Walker played nearly 40 minutes against Minnesota, but finished strong after a rough start. He scored 13 points in the fourth quarter and overtime, which is a very encouraging sign.
“The whole point of the year was to build him up to that point where you can throw a couple games like that at him,” Stevens said. “The reason why I kept him basically under 35 the whole year was so that we could build up nights like this if we need to but we’ll go from there. I thought he struggled a little bit, but he’s who he was when it mattered most when he had to knock down those shots in overtime.”
With Walker getting a good stretch of run with what should be a mostly full Celtics squad, we may finally get to see how much of this season has been really real. We’re inching closer towards NBA normalcy where playoffs give teams days off, extra travel time, and opportunities to practice. COVID-19 vaccines could allow them a sense of freedom on the road, giving them a chance to do simple things like have team dinners.
It might not matter at all. But it might. Who gets to say ‘I told you so” at the end is still not clear.
“You still can't get a pulse on how good we can be,” Stevens said. “That's been frustrating. But it is what it is. I said this the other day. I understand the discussion about the ups-and-downs, and the reaction to the ups-and-downs, and I understand all of it. I'm not all that shocked with what we've been through. I do wish we'd played better at times, but if that means we'll play better heading into this stretch run once we fully get healthy, then that will be worth it.”
