It’s funny how circumstances can change our opinions.
Coming into the season, a hard-fought second-round loss to the Milwaukee Bucks would have been a perfectly fine ending to the season. With a new coach, new system, and new roles and responsibilities to figure out, losing to the champs while getting their licks in would have actually been encouraging.
Now, it would be a disappointment.
The Celtics face elimination tonight in Milwaukee against a team they’ve outplayed for much of the series. They could have stolen Game 3 and they should have won Game 5 going away. The loss Wednesday night is now being discussed in terms of the worst playoff losses in team history. Losing Game 6 after that?
That would be bad.
“We understand that it was an opportunity missed and we understand the opportunity ahead of us,” Ime Udoka said after the team’s morning shootaround. “We stew in it for a minute and are pissed about it, but understanding that we have outplayed them for a lot of this series … but we have to be able to finish, and so we understand that.”
If there's anything Udoka has become known for in Boston, it’s his ability to push his team past its disappointments. Once his guys finally bought into his system, the Celtics became a juggernaut. When they’ve been knocked down, they’ve picked themselves back up.
In a way, Udoka has reformed a bunch of isolation basketball addicts, hooked on trying to do things by themselves on the court. The 12 steps of recovery for these Celtics are the number of passes and cuts they need to make to score easily.
They are, however, prone to a relapse or two, and we know that relapses are never conveniently timed. And they are almost always costly.
Dealing with an addict requires tough love, and these isolation fiends in green, who eschew the hustle plays and critical closing seconds of a defensive possession so they can go try to score some more, need more of it.
“For us, it’s more of staying consistent with the things we’ve done throughout the series which is defending at a high level, and when we haven’t, transition and offensive rebounds, those things that have come back to bite us,” Udoka said. “It seems not as much about anything that they are doing plays-wise, it’s the effort plays and those are the things that stood out in Game 5 and the way we kind of let it get away in the fourth quarter.”
That's a nicely packaged quote for us in the media, but the message behind it is a tough one for his team.
They, the Bucks, haven't really done anything to win these games. It’s been you, the Celtics, making these mistakes and paying the price for it.
Udoka has spent this season pushing his team past its own bad habits. Now, with elimination staring at them in the face, he faces the biggest test of this ability.
It’s when things aren’t working that the players tend to break rank and do things themselves. It’s when a 14-point lead fizzles its way down to six that guys start saying to themselves ‘I have to make a play’ rather than trusting the system to generate a good look.
All of that is magnified in this elimination situation. The Bucks have punched first this whole series, and the Celtics have held their ground well. If the Bucks are able to do the same in Game 6, will Boston still be able to absorb the hit and fire back? Or will players revert to their old habits again?
Udoka, a first-year head coach, has to figure out the right buttons to press to get his guys focused for 48 minutes. Boston has to play a nearly perfect game tonight, because champions don’t fade quietly into the good night in these situations. Giannis Antetokounmpo will be out for blood. The Celtics can’t let him have it.
These Celtics have come a long way. Before the season started, I might have willingly signed up for this exact situation for the Celtics, but they’ve come too far to be happy with it now. They’ve proven they are the better team when they are putting everything together. Even without certain players, they’ve shown they can be better than Milwaukee.
Milwaukee has better closers, though, and if these Celtics want to be thought of in that same class, they have to show up at Fiserv Forum tonight and take that mantle.
They didn’t come this far just to lose like this. It’s time to show what they're really made of.