The NBA schedule is winding down, with about a week-and-a-half left to go before the play-in tournament begins and then we get down to the real business at hand.
Here’s a quick look around the league, through a Celtics lens, to see what’s going on as the NBA regular season crawls to its conclusion.
- Milwaukee Bucks show the Celtics how it’s done
The Indiana Pacers were without Tyrese Haliburton, Chris Duarte, Kendall Brown, Buddy Hield, and Myles Turner, facing one of the best teams in the NBA.
Sound familiar?
The Pacers hung around, going into the half down four. The Bucks spent the third quarter smacking Indiana around and they built a 23 point lead in the fourth quarter before coasting to a 13 point win.
That's how a good team coasts to a win.
They also got a 51 point night from Jrue Holiday and a 38/17/12 triple double from Giannis Antetokounmpo and neither guy played more than 32:28.
Things can change quickly, especially in the playoffs when so much is based off matchups, but the Bucks have closed the season playing great basketball. The Celtics have played three great games and seem to be picking their spots.
Milwaukee decided they wanted the top seed and they just came and took it. They're putting on a masterclass in closing the season. If this translates to the playoffs and Boston gets eliminated before the Finals, the Celtics will have a LOT of questions to answer about how they closed the season.
Let's see how the Celtics handle Milwaukee tonight. This will say a lot about each team's attitude. They are on different trajectories right now, so the timing of this is interesting. Seeding isn't really an issue anymore. Even with a tiebreaker in hand, it's almost impossible for Boston to make up a three-game deficit with six games left. This game is about sending a message, and I feel like Milwaukee will want to send a big one. How will Boston respond?
- MVP is a 3-horse race
ESPN’s final MVP straw poll is out, and it’s dominated by Joel Embiid, Nikola Jokic, and Antetokounmpo.
Jayson Tatum, who was at the top of the poll after the first vote, has fallen way out of contention into fourth.
Honestly, the MVP can be any of those top three guys. Embiid leads the straw poll by two overall points but Jokic has two more first place votes. Giannis is solidly in third but I don’t know how he’s not more in the mix considering Milwaukee’s huge run lately.
This is where voter fatigue and narratives come into play. I can completely see someone agonizing over this and saying ‘well, Giannis already has two and a ring, Jokic has two in a row, so let’s just give it to Embiid because he should have had one by now and it’s basically a coin flip at this point.’
And that's fine, by the way. At least Philly will get to win something during the Embiid era.
Tatum’s drop in this poll is notable. The early favorite is well out of the mix, picking up just one second place vote and two third place votes. Some of his numbers are up this season, but I don’t think he’s had a particularly great one. I’d say it’s more up-and-down where the highs are pretty damn high but the lows -- usually in games where he’s hunting 3-pointers instead of attacking -- feel pretty low. I don’t care that they combine to average more than he has in the past. Tatum needs to find some consistency in his game.
- Congratulations to the Sacramento Kings
They clinched their first playoff berth in 16 years with their blowout win over Portland last night. They are pretty locked into the third seed in the West, which is amazing for them. They have generated one of the best offenses in NBA history, and they are incredibly fun to watch.
Everyone has questions about them in the playoffs right now. Things can change, but they’d be matched up against Golden State right now and I think the whole world would pick the Warriors in that series, even with the Warriors’ horrible road record.
We’ll see if the Kings can use that ‘us against the world’ motivation to ride a wave deep into the playoffs. I’d love to see Cinderella run out of them.
More so, I’m just having fun watching Kings fans react. I think it’s good for Celtics fans to watch a fanbase celebrate something like this to appreciate what we have here in Boston. Sacramento had to fight to keep that crappy team that went through horrible owners, front offices, and coaches to finally get to this point. This is all they wanted. They're legitimately happy and having fun there.
Meanwhile, we’re moping around because the 52-win Celtics aren’t winning by enough points. And hey, count me amongst the mopers. Neither side is wrong -- the expectations are a lot higher in Boston, so that's the standard we hold. The Kings were desperate to simply not suck, and now they don’t.
Still, it’s fun to see Kings fans celebrate this. They deserve their moment after all they’ve been through.
- The Kyrie Irving effect is still in … umm… effect.
The Mavericks traded for Irving and went on to lose 14 of 20 games to currently sit outside the play-in tournament.
Honestly, this is the quickest I’ve seen Irving decimate a team in a long time.
To be fair, it’s not all his fault … at least not in the usual sense. He hasn’t had time to infect the locker room with his malaise or challenge the front office with extended absences. Right now it just seems to be poor timing and adding a horrible defender while giving up good ones in the trade.
Still, the Mavs made sacrifices to get Irving and now they have to live with the results. What’s funny is I still hear people worrying about whether the Mavs are going to be able to keep Irving after all of this, as if he isn’t part of the problem. Irving called it a “clusterf***,” and trust me, if anyone in the world knows about those, it’s him.
No team should be in the Kyrie business, except for maybe the Lakers because LeBron James is the only human with the cachet to keep Irving somewhat in line. The Mavs? Well, let’s just say they should have seen this coming, but they blew too many moves prior to this one to view Irving appropriately.
I still think Kyrie’s attitude exists in Boston’s locker room. I still think his casual attitude towards the regular season is ingrained in Tatum and that leads to some of what we’re seeing here. I feel like if Tatum spent those two years playing next to Antetokounmpo or Damian Lillard, we wouldn’t be seeing this level of inconsistency.
Irving will be some other team’s problem soon enough. There's no way he’s going back to Dallas if they miss the playoffs. It’ll be interesting to see what the long-term impact on Luka Doncic will be.