It’s so easy to get swept up in the madness of the NBA Finals; to live and die game-to-game and get frustrated by every little mistake. It’s very easy to stand in front of your TV, hands linked on top of your head, muttering about guys standing around and why certain passes were thrown.
It’s the NBA Finals. A championship is two games away. You can picture yourself at the parade.
Sports are a source of civic pride for people who spend a lot of hard-earned money to wear their city’s name in the team’s colors across their chests. A championship is the ultimate bragging right, where no matter what anyone says about your team, you can scoreboard your way to winning the argument.
These Celtics are so close to filling the city with that pride, and if we’re being honest, a little bit of the arrogance that just feels so fun to express.
At the same time, I think it’s time to accept certain truths about this team.
This team was never constructed for this deep of a run. Ime Udoka is less basketball coach and more mad scientist testing the limits of basketball thermodynamics in trying to pull perpetual motion out of his Celtics. Those machines never work, and neither do the Celtics, who continue to devolve into a stagnant offensive mess as each of these finals games wears on.
It’s not that they don’t want to. It’s not that they have no heart. And while it’s tempting to lean on platitudes at times of confusion over their performance, it’s also important to remember they’ve won two Game 7’s along the way, dispatching the defending champs and the top seed. That takes heart and desire. A team doesn’t get to two wins from a title without heart, grit, determination, and all the other cliches floating around right now.
In reality, this team may have had about 18 playoff games in their legs. A blown Game 5 against Milwaukee and Game 6 against the Heat used two games that they need right now. The cumulative effect of having to win those extra games with the added travel, just seems to be a bit too much for them right now. In retrospect, the added rest and time spent in treatment rather than on flights would have given them some added lift in their legs for shots and juice to close out games.
They seem to be running on fumes now, and the worst of their habits are starting to return because of that. Human nature is what it is, regardless of their age or the zeroes in their bank account. I know that when the grind gets me down and you give me a choice between salad and a water or pizza and beer for dinner, I’m going for the slices and suds every time.
Boston’s bench has had nothing in the Finals outside of Game 1. They're unable to take the pressure off of Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown, which means Ime Udoka has no choice but to hope his two pillars have some untapped reserves somewhere in them.
Instead of pounding the rock, Udoka is trying to squeeze more minutes out of it.
It’s hard to blame him. He’s running out of options.
This is all not to say that the Celtics can’t win the series now, but it going to take a level of mental willpower that none of these guys have never reached. Either that, or Udoka is going to have to go into full desperation mode and get one of his fresh bench guys into the game and hope for the best.
The Celtics have turned what was an evaluation year into a championship run, and they still have a shot at pulling this off. If they do, it will be a story of great will and incredible teamwork to hold together in the toughest of times and knock off a past champion making one more run at glory.
If they can win, it will be one of the most incredible Celtics championship stories of all time.
It's not some indictment of their personalities if they don’t, though. Yes, it will feel like a missed opportunity that doesn’t come around very often, and there's no guarantee any of these guys will be back in the Finals, but they've come far enough to earn a greater level of respect for what they've accomplished and the promise of what’s to come moving forward.
