You all know I like to use analogies and some literary or pop culture references to highlight my points or make them more relatable and easier to digest.
So in the wake of the Celtics living up to their words, bouncing back in Milwaukee after not overreacting to their loss in Washington, and proving they do, indeed, have everything it takes to match up well with and beat the Bucks, I’ll make my point with a piece of elite cinema.
I’m stupid, you’re smart.
I was wrong, you were right.
You're the best. I’m the worst.
You’re very good looking, I’m not attractive.
I’ve been on the Celtics' case for their post-break shenanigans, questioning their resolve and ability to pull through in the toughest moments. I’ve wondered aloud if they are losing focus at the wrong time and losing sight of the lessons they’ve learned since their NBA Finals loss.
And while I’m still not thrilled about the way they’ve handled themselves since the break, I think some of it might have been an overreaction.
“I think all season long, we’ve been a team that rises to the occasion,” Malcolm Brogdon said in a pregame interview that was somewhat prescient and also somewhat introspective. “When we play good teams, we play great. We play really well. And when we play teams that we’re supposed to beat, it can go either way. We haven't been super consistent.”
Nothing that's been said about this team heading into this game was wrong, necessarily. They do make things harder for themselves. They do raise concerns about what kind of habits they're building when they constantly play down to competition. And some of the things they say after the games can be off-putting.
They often put things in ways that make me say “you better be right about this.”
What can I say? They're right.
“I think we've been pretty consistent all year long, for the most part,” Jaylen Brown said. “We probably should be closer to 60 wins at this point, but I think we're a better team than we were last year. I think we won more games than we did last year. And overall, we haven't dropped the ball. We might have lost some games, but we didn't let a bad game turn into a bad two weeks or a bad month. We've been able to pretty much bounce back.”
The truth actually lies somewhere in between the teams’ insistence that everything is fine and the outside world’s complete panic. If anything, the past few weeks has been the scene at the end of Animal House when Kevin Bacon is screaming “ALL IS WELL” amongst the chaos.
Yes, they should be closer to 60 games, which proves the point I and other have been making. But also, yes, they have bounced back. They have won 53 games, second-most in the NBA, and they haven't lost more than three games in a row all year. At 23-10, they’ve lost a few too many to below .500 teams … but at 30-14, they have the league’s best record against teams above .500.
Are they perfect? No. Can they be better? Yes. Do they have a chance to win it all? Absolutely. And if we’re being completely fair, their attitude after this game was similarly as blase as it was after the loss to Washington.
When asked about bouncing back to face the Utah Jazz tomorrow night, Jayson Tatum they had to “(forget) about tonight. The game is over. It happened. And we have a game tomorrow. And we talked about it in the locker room. They all count as one, we won, it don't necessarily mean much, so we gotta move on. We’re gonna show how good of a team we are by the way we respond tomorrow. That's all that matters at this point.”
I don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow night. They still have a chance at the top seed but they clearly don’t seem to care about that all that much. Frankly, I’ve cared about it more than they have. So whose fault is it that they didn’t?
Is it their fault for not living up to my expectations? Are they wrong for not doing what I thought they should do? Or am I wrong for placing importance on something they didn’t seem to be targeting all that much to begin with?
I guess I was thrown off by Brogdon saying it was important, but it’s hard to remember that guys will sometimes give good quotes before they tell the media the truth.
The Celtics went into Milwaukee and proved a few points. They showed us all that the matchups still matter and that they still have some advantages they can lean on to beat the Bucks. They proved they can win on the road, thus making the seeding less important than taking some time to get to full health. And they proved that some bad regular season losses don’t really have much bearing on how they’ll play against the good teams.
We can scream about the other stuff all we want, but it’s time to realize that we’re screaming into the abyss. They clearly know where the switch is, and they can flip it when they want to. As long as that's the case, and as long as they choose to flip it when the playoffs begin, then the rest is just noise to them.
