Everyone in the building knew where things were heading by the time the Hornets called timeout at the 4:32 mark of the first quarter. The Celtics' lead was 33-16, and everything was easy.
Well, easy for everyone except for maybe Blake Griffin, who by that point was clearly gassed.
Griffin, who started in place of Al Horford, doesn’t usually get seven minutes of playing time in a row as he did in the first quarter. What he did with those minutes, though, set a tone for what was about to happen to the poor Charlotte Hornets.
Griffin stood in for Horford in burying what has become the traditional first 3-pointer of the game for Boston. He got two offensive rebounds to keep a possession alive, and ultimately get Derrick White an open 3-pointer. His third rebound of the game ended up as a Marcus Smart 3-pointer.
By the end of his stint, he looked mostly like a traffic cop pointing people in the right direction. He needed a break, but he earned it, and not just with his play. The fact that he was an option as a starter at all is kind of amazing.
“It’s honestly a credit to the training staff and the strength and conditioning staff,” he said. “You’re not trying to accomplish everything in one day, but you kind of chip away at it and I’ve felt better and better almost each week that I’ve been here.”
In his second stint, a little bit of the old Griffin found his way onto the court. White tossed a perfect lob to the right of the rim, and Griffin came bouncing in from the right corner to catch it with his right hand and slam it down. The bench exploded. The building did too.
“I just always think it’s really funny. I’ve said this before, but at the beginning of my career, it was all do something else besides dunk and now everybody just wants me to dunk,” Griffin joked. “So it’s just a good lesson in that you can never please everybody, but it’s just good to be out there, be healthy and be able to contribute and help out.”
Lessons are part of the Griffin experience, much more so than the 9 points and 4 rebounds he gave Boston in his 21:35 on the floor. It’s nice that Griffin provided a nice storyline for all of us in the media to latch onto in an otherwise uninteresting blowout win, but that's not what this story is really about.
“I like Blake because he's a great person,” Joe Mazzulla said after the win. “He's been great for our team, on and off the court … Constantly in our young guys' ears, just giving guys his experience, how his career has gone and where he was successful. And just a sense of humor and kind of just an overall great guy. And so guys flock to him and he's thankful for that.”
Horford joked during training camp that Griffin blended in so seamlessly that it felt like he was always a part of the team. However, it’s his experiences elsewhere that help give the team the perspective that it needs to be happy in Boston. Both he and Malcolm Brogdon come from what some might, somewhere along the way, have seen as greener pastures.
“It’s honestly a very common conversation I have with guys, just about appreciating where they are,” Brogdon said of his teammates that have only known Boston as an organization. “For me and Blake, we’ve been in situations where a team is not winning, where the team is really struggling and there’s chaos … When you’re on one team, one organization for so long, there’s always a wonder of what it’s like somewhere else. It doesn’t matter how well you’re doing, there’s always a wonder of what it would be like somewhere else. So I try to get guys not to wonder and just enjoy what they have because this is special.”
Griffin’s NBA road has been interesting. He came in as a phenom, the face of a franchise and the league. Now he’s mostly a friendly face in the locker room, along for the ride, and pitching in here and there.
“Things can change in the blink of an eye in the NBA,” Griffin said, adding a message to his bench mates. “You can get thrown into a game. (Payton Pritchard) and Luke (Kornet) got thrown into the game in the third quarter against Sacramento and they changed the game. Those things matter, and those things matter to coaching staffs and fans see that, people appreciate that. This fanbase appreciates guys who play hard. Before every game I talk to everybody, I always tell them something and my message to Payton is just to stay locked in and do what you do. That’s all he has to do.”
Some may say the Celtics dusted Griffin off and he responded well, but that undersells what he’s meant to the Celtics. This performance, and the reaction to it, is more of a reward for the leadership he brings to a team that needed his unique perspective.
It resonates with Smart, who said “having a guy like that who understands, who's been in this league, who's done some spectacular things himself individually and then to come in and to take a lesser role but still be happy and joyous about it, teaching us younger guys how to play and then to come to see what he did tonight. … that's all you can ask for from a guy like Blake. He gives it every night. We love Blake and we're glad he's here.”