MILWAUKEE -- Now things are about to get fun.
Boston took a shot to the chin and had their knees wobbled in Game 1. They returned fire and staggered the champs in Game 2.
Now it’s time to see what these teams are made of.
I’ve compared this series to the Muhamad Ali-George Foreman Rumble in the Jungle, but it might end up being more like Peter Griffin fighting a chicken by the time it’s over -- a brutal back and forth that goes on forever with each side thinking it has an advantage until the other finds some wild way to answer.
This is the beauty of the seven-game series. Sure, the luck of a tournament heightens the excitement of each game, but the chess match of a series between evenly-matched teams is where the true greats make their names.
It’s a bit poetic for Boston to be going through the champs at this stage of their progression. It was three years ago that the Celtics went to the Fiserv Forum with championship hopes. We know how things went in that series, with the number 11 suddenly becoming available for others to wear when it was over.
That was the snowball pushed at the top of the mountain that ultimately became the avalanche that swept the old Celtics out and these new Celtics in. No one will be lighting sage around the court, but there will be some exorcizing of demons if the Celtics can come out of Milwaukee having regained the home advantage.
Not that these guys will think about those things. That's for us to muse about. This current version of the team, the 76th iteration of the Celtics, doesn’t have the time to dwell on what has passed. Three years ago? They don’t care much about what happened three weeks ago at this point. What they care about is what will happen at 3:30 on Saturday when the ball is tossed at center court. That's when what happened three months ago will be put to its biggest test yet.
The Bucks have a championship pedigree and Giannis Antetokounmpo, which might just be enough to win. He’s already shown he can pass his way to a win. We know he can obviously score his way to wins. And we’ve seen him be able to screen the Bucks into easy scoring chances in this series. Having a weapon that can be used in that many ways almost isn’t fair.
Jayson Tatum is slowly marching his way into that echelon. He’s not quite the force of nature Antetokounmpo is but he’s a pretty multidimensional weapon himself. How each coach chooses to use their biggest gun is one of the more interesting back-and-forths of the series. Finding a way to shake one of them loose for more than a couple of minutes could be what swings things in someone’s favor.
Good luck.
But that's the joy of what this weekend will bring. Which coach can come up with that thing in Game 3 that gets us salivating? Can it be countered? Will it be? Which player will find a seam to make an amazing, game-changing play? Which one will still make a play even when he’s defended perfectly? Which will find a way to ignore the lactic acid building up in his muscles and out-work someone else on his way to something improbable.
Maybe boxing was the wrong analogy all along. Maybe Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, with its intense, exhausting grappling and constant attempts at submissions is the better way to look at this.
The difference between winning and losing is minute. Each side is just waiting for the other to slip up somehow, and somewhere in that jumbled mass of bodies is an answer to a move that hasn't been made yet.
One single bounce could be the difference between winning this series and eventually a championship and going home with a second-round loss and wondering what could have been.
This is when basketball gets really fun, however it goes.