The tagline for this Celtics playoff run is “Unfinished Business,” where the “is” in unfinished is stylized to look like an 18.
It’s an obvious reference to their run to the NBA Finals and the elusive 18th championship.
It’s a message crafted from expectation. It’s a message to everyone that this team is capable of finishing what last year’s team couldn't.
And wouldn’t you know it, that on almost the exact anniversary of one of last season’s most crushing playoff losses, the Celtics would take the floor and honor it with a purely terrible defeat handed down by the 76ers.
“That was the first game of the playoffs that we didn’t play well, in my opinion, so we can’t lose our perspective,” Joe Mazzulla said. “That was our first really, really bad game of the playoffs. So it doesn’t come at necessarily the best time, but we just have to shift our perspective and get ready for the next game.”
The next game could be the last game, putting the Celtics right in line behind the Boston Bruins for an unceremonious and extraordinarily premature booting from the playoffs. The Celtics are the precious last hope for Boston sports fans looking for a winner to quench their parade lust.
The hockey team blew it. The football team is figuring itself out. And the baseball team isn’t expected to do much of anything.
The Celtics are Boston’s last hope among the major pro sports. And for the first time in this postseason, they're looking pretty hopeless.
“We’re disappointed. We’re definitely disappointed,” Marcus Smart said. “We’re disappointed in the way we played, for sure. The effort. That's just not who we are. So we were very disappointed but the good thing about it is you can't get too high, you can't get too low. Like I said, we have another game so there's no need and there's no will for us to feel sorry for ourselves. We got to just go out there.”
There's a mood around the locker room that as long as you’re still alive, you have a chance. The Celtics might be down 3-2 to Philadelphia, but a year ago they were down 3-2 to the defending champions and Giannis Antetokounmpo.
“We've been in this position before,” Al Horford said. “It's not ideal. But we still have an opportunity. We understand what it takes to go on the road on Thursday."
They understand what it takes to win these games. However, what they fail to understand is how to actually do it.
Someone can hand me a blueprint of a rocket ship and tell me how it’s built, it doesn’t mean I’m a rocket scientist.
“The energy wasn't right. It could have been better, way better,” Smart said of the team’s Game 5 shellacking. “They're feeling good. We got to go into a hostile environment and we got to just go take it, it's not going to be easy.”
It never is with these guys. One of the unanswered questions from the night was how, in a Game 5, a team could play with this little focus. How is it possible that a team could flitter away another game when they’ve had so many chances at winning.
Not only does that put the Celtics on the brink of elimination, it puts them behind if they make it past Philadelphia to face either the Knicks or the Heat. Now they’ll have to do what they did last season and beat a good team twice just to turn around and play someone else two days later. And the part I glossed over, the part of actually winning and beating a really good team, is going to be the hardest part because beating the Celtics will exercise Sixers demons.
They're going to be ready.
“The brutality of it. It's a true dogfight, scratching and clawing, biting, blood, everything,” Smart said. “And if you're not willing to pretty much get dirty, if you're not willing to bleed. If you’re not willing to break something, willing to tear something, going hard, then you shouldn’t be on that court because that's what it is. That's what the playoffs are about. Hopefully you stay safe but that's the mentality. You gotta go, you gotta be willing to risk it all for these games. And that's the mentality we gotta to have.”
We’ve heard that before. The Celtics always know the mentality they're supposed to have. They just don’t always have it. What they need to do is find it before it’s too late.
“Last year is over. This year got to come out and be better than we were tonight or we’ll have a different ending,” Browns said. “Obviously we still are in this series, and we got to muster up whatever we got left to be better for Game 6.”