BROOKLYN, NY -- One of the greatest lines in cinematic history comes from They Live, a terrible late-80’s sci-fi thriller starring wrestling legend Rowdy Roddy Piper as an alien hunter. When he walks into a bank and sees through his special sunglasses that it is full of aliens, he proclaims …
“I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass.” And then, after a dramatic pause, he adds “And I’m all out of bubblegum.”
The Celtics starred in the sequel these past two weeks as they fought off one guy with out-of-this-world basketball powers and another who certainly seems to be from another planet sometimes. It’s a fight few thought they should have taken on, but the Celtics did it anyway.
“We said it quite openly, we're not running from anybody,” Ime Udoka said after his team completed the sweep (which is a cool thing to say, but it lacks the panache of the bubblegum line). “The overall message that I gave the team and they relayed back to me is we're not scared of anybody and we're not running from anybody. If you are going to win, you have to go through certain teams at certain times anyway so might as well get a really good test early. I think it will help us going down the line.”
If we’ve learned one lesson from year one of Ime Udoka, it’s that when he exudes this much confidence in something, there's a reason for it.
“He kind of set the tone from the jump how he felt about it,” Jaylen Brown said. “We all came to the conclusion that, like, look, man, if we want to do something special, ain't no shortcuts, ain't no trying to manipulate or ducking. Sometimes you gotta take the hard way or what perceives to be that way and let the chips fall where they may. Ime definitely led us in that direction, and we all agreed and followed suit."
This Celtics team isn’t perfect, but it is relentless. While the outside world focused on what Brooklyn could do and who they had, Boston focused on themselves and what they did well. They put the onus on Brooklyn to make the adjustments, and the Nets couldn't.
Udoka, whose institutional knowledge of how Kevin Durant ticked went back to his own playing days, didn’t just give the Celtics a blueprint for beating the Nets and their otherworldly superstar, showed them how to carry themselves while doing it.
"It's important, man, just to maintain who you are,” Brown said. “We were not worried about anyone else. It's all about us trying to be the best team that we can possibly be. I think if we can come out, ready to play and compete, it's one of the best teams in basketball -- the best team in basketball. We feel confident, we feel strong against anybody. And we're going to come to play every single game."
People were right to say one team should have been afraid of the other in this series. They were just wrong about which was which.
“He’s done an unbelievable job in his first year,” Jayson Tatum said of his coach. “All the expectations, the up-and-down season we were having and we turned it around. It took everybody. Players, coaches, kind of a shame he’s not a finalist for coach of the year, because he definitely deserves it. I’m happy for him, in his first season what he’s been able to accomplish, getting his first playoff win as a head coach. That’s big. Glad that we got him.”
Maybe the more accurate depiction of Udoka comes from another movie, Kill Bill. He is a basketball version of Hattori Hanzo, the master sword maker who creates a weapon so sharp and powerful it would cut God himself if he got in its way.
That's the edge that Udoka has molded in this team. It took a long time to get to this point. There was a lot of hammering of his players in film sessions and shaping of their skills on the court. Udoka knew the sheathed power of his team heading into the series, and it fueled his confidence.
But like Hanzo, there is a tremendous level of respect for the weapon and its power. Yes, they carved the Nets to pieces with their defensive game plan, but this isn’t time to celebrate. The byproduct of not believing in this team before will be that everyone finally gets it now. Once the sword is in action, people get it.
It’s easy to get cocky at that point, brush your shoulders off, puff out your chest, and take a loud, demonstrative victory lap.
Not these guys.
“I think that we are not the best team. We still have some ways to go. We still have work,” Marcus Smart said. “We have to have that mentality that we’re not the best team, because once you get that mentality that we’re the best team, you start to get complacent and things start to kick in and bad habits, and we don’t want that.”
Who knows how this ends for the Celtics, but one thing has been made quite clear.
They are here to chew bubblegum and kick some ass … and they're all out of bubblegum.