I wouldn’t blame Brad Stevens if, for a brief moment, he lost himself in watching what the Miami Heat had become. I wouldn’t be surprised if, after watching them decimate his Celtics for so much of their Sunday matinee, he had a fleeting Liz Lemon “I want to go to there” moment.
The last time these two teams met in any kind of series, the Heat were punching a ticket to the NBA Finals, which means both of these teams had similarly short turnarounds. Both teams have lost key players to injuries and both have been crushed with COVID-19 absences.
Yet, here are the now 38-31 Heat, winners of three straight games, locking up at least the sixth overall seed in the East. They’ve gone 26-14 since February 18, when they were 12-17 and looking like everything had been falling apart.
“When that team’s full, nobody’s going to want to play them,” Stevens said after the game. “They can go win anywhere, they can make shots anywhere, they can have two or three different guys make shots on a given night that maybe don’t do as much the night before. They just have a lot of firepower. And they are obviously exceptionally well-coached, I’ve said that, and they do look like they are peaking at the right time.”
Miami’s path is the one Stevens has dreamt of all year. The Celtics, staggering in from a whiplash-inducing turnaround, would navigate the ensuing rough waters, stay together as a unit, lift each others’ spirits until the crocuses sprung from Boston’s thawing ground. And just like the spring blooms, Stevens had hoped April and May would bring forth a vibrant explosion of new life inside his Garden.
Instead, the green pollen film on our cars has become less annoying than the game film from the Green and White. Unlike the Heat, who are only missing mid-season acquisition Victor Oladipo, Boston continues to limp its way through games missing multiple key players.
“We've had the misfortune of the injuries all the way through, but we've always had hope that at the end we would be full,” Stevens said. “That was taken away this weekend.”
Jaylen Brown’s injury will ensure Boston will have played zero games this season in which their seven top players were healthy. The only stretch when they were close was during their six-game winning streak which had many of us, especially me, convinced things were actually going to Brad’s plan.
They haven’t won more than two games in a row since then. They went 4-7 after that streak, a record that includes a loss to the Oklahoma City Thunder, which is in the midst of one of the most historically prolific stretches of losing the NBA has ever seen.
Miami, meanwhile, is 8-3 over that same period, blazing past the Celtics in the standings much like they blazed past the Celtics on cut after cut after cut over the past two games.
The Heat displayed a cohesion in these past two games that Boston has rarely achieved this season. Stevens has said some variation of “we have to play well to win” countless times this season, yet this team has either not been able, or not been willing, to do what he’s asked.
Miami cruised through Boston and took two must-win games from the Celtics. They showed that in-season improvement is possible, and they've grown into a team that looks just about as dangerous as the one in the bubble.
The Celtics, conversely, have had neither the good fortune of getting healthy, nor the added effort to make up for those losses.
In March, Stevens said “we don't have much time left, when you look at it from a big-picture standpoint, and I'm hopeful that we can get better, get better, get better and peak at the right time. I think that's ultimately our challenge and our task.”
They have failed that task. As Stevens tried to pick up the pieces of a loss to a team that accomplished what his could not, he shifted to trying to salvage what was left.
“Now it is truly time to look at it and say this is how we think we have to do it to have our best chance,” he said. “I like the guys in the room. There's going to be a lot more required of our best players and it's a challenge they're going to have to step up to. We've been here before when some of our best players aren't available and you head into the postseason and we'll see where we land and we'll see what happens. But we have enough in the room to be a nuisance.”
They might have enough in the room, but do they have enough left in their legs, or more importantly, their hearts?