The Celtics season is 50 games old, which means it’s time for it to get a colonoscopy.
Don’t worry, Celtics. The prep is worse than the procedure.
Boston has a five-game lead with 32 games to play, so that means Boston finishing 28-4 to close the season guarantees them the top spot. They won’t, but then again, the competition won’t go 30-0 the rest of the way either (it only feels like Cleveland might never lose again). If Boston continues to win at a 76% clip, they’ll win 24 more games, giving them a 62-20 record. That would mean Cleveland would have to go 30-4, Milwaukee would have to go 29-3, and the Knicks would have to go 30-2 to just tie the Celtics. Boston already holds the tiebreaker against New York and Cleveland, so they’d each have to win 31 games in this scenario.
I’m leaving Philly off because a 32-1 finish now that Joel Embiid will miss at least a month after knee surgery seems even more improbable.
Oh, and Boston has the second-easiest remaining strength of schedule AND one game each against Cleveland and Philadelphia and two games each against Milwaukee and New York. One more win against the Sixers and Bucks would give Boston the tiebreaker over both of them as well.
This is all a very long-winded way to say Boston has a pretty good grip on the top seed. The Sixers are struggling without their star, the Bucks are struggling in general, and the Cavs and Knicks are hot but a notch below the Celtics. As long as the Celtics keep going the way they're going, they’ll be fine.
Side note: How many of you would have gladly signed up for a 62-win season back in October? Does everyone understand how good an NBA team has to be to win 60-plus games?
Statistically, Boston is in prime position with the league’s second-ranked offense (120.3 points per 100 possessions) and the third-ranked defense (110.6), which gives them the league’s best net rating at +9.8. Their offense is three points per 100 possessions ahead of last year’s pace while the defense is at the exact same rating.
Offensively, they are still one of the more isolation-heavy teams in the league. They are fourth in isolation frequency (8.4%) which is about as much as they isolated last year (8%). They are 23rd in assist percentage (60%), a 3.2% drop from last season when they were fifth in the league. Their shooting percentages right now (60% true shooting, 56.6% effective field goal percentage) are exactly where they were last year.
The offense is basically where it was last season. Their 3-point attempts are actually down a tick but by an almost negligible amount. They're getting a tiny bit more in the midrange, which is probably the Kristaps Porzingis effect. Also part of the Porzingis effect is the jump from 2.8% post-ups to 7.1%, second-most in the league. Boston is also averaging the second-most points per possession (1.16) on those post-ups. Porzingis is posting up 17.7% of the time he’s on the floor and scoring 1.42 PPP on those, easily the best among those high-frequency post-up players (players with 10% or higher frequency). Ivica Zubac is second at 1.28 PPP.
Defensively, they're one of the league’s best defensive rebounding teams. They're 10th in second-chance points allowed, but less than two points off the leader so if they grab one more rebound per game they’d be the best. The Celtics protect the ball well, which makes their transition defense really good (first in opponent points off turnovers, seven in fastbreak points allowed). The Celtics are generally good at protecting the paint, allowing 47.6 points in that area, good for a ninth-place tie. Again, if they just grab one more rebound and prevent one putback per game, they’d be second in the league, so the margin is small.
How they defend is a little different. They went from 10th in the league in charges drawn to 22nd. They drew 47 last year and through 50 games this season they’ve only gotten 15 and are on pace to get to 25. Their blocked shots have gone up from 5.2 to 6.6 per game.
They still don’t get a ton of deflections or steals, despite Joe Mazzulla declaring in the preseason that he wanted to get more of each this year. In fact, their steals are exactly at last year’s 6.4 per game, which is second-to-last this season (only Detroit has fewer).
The Celtics are defending by contesting shots and clearing the rebounds. They are allowing the third-lowest field goal percentage in the league while contesting the third-most field goal attempts. Teams just aren’t getting clean looks against Boston. This is who they were last year as well.
The biggest difference this season, despite some of the reactions we’ve seen, is how Boston performs in the clutch. They are 15-8 in clutch situations, a 65.2% winning percentage, which is fifth-best in the league. That's in line with the 64.9% from last season, but their field goal percentage was 41.8% versus 46.6% this season. They are basically shooting one less 3-pointer and one more 2-pointer this season in those situations, which isn’t a ton but considering the “clutch” is the final five minutes of a game, a one-shot variance is magnified. They're getting to the line a tiny bit more, but they're shooting 6.1% better on clutch free throws. Their 85.9% is actually fourth-best in the league. Last year they were +0.9 in the clutch, so far this year they're a league-best +2.4.
Last season, Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown each averaged three points per game in the clutch as the top two players on the team, followed by Marcus Smart at 2. Now Tatum is averaging 2.7, Porzingis is matching him, Derrick White is at 2.3, and Brown is at 2.
All these numbers add up to suggest the Celtics are a really good team with really good players capable of performing well when needed. They still haven't lost three games in a row this season and they've only lost consecutive games once. They have 21 wins against teams above .500, which is best in the NBA. They are 17-2 versus teams below .500, the second-fewest losses against bad teams (New York is 21-1 … wow). They are 23-3 at home and 15-9 on the road. If they win 88% of their home games and 62% of their road games in the playoffs, they’ll be in pretty good shape.
Do they still have flaws? Obviously. They're not perfect. They have some stinkers on their resume and they have some blowouts. They own the league’s best point differential (+9.6) and second is almost four full points behind. Once you pull back the magnifying glass and stop picking at every little flaw, you’ll see that relative to the rest of the league, they're clearly the best team in the NBA. The key for the Celtics is to keep pushing and preach that mentality Mazzulla is always preaching; to continue to use those flaws as hunger to improve rather than leaning on all these glistening stats to feel full and satisfied.
“Humility is always good,” Mazzulla recently said. “You play 82 games, so like there’s times where you’re always going to have — you have your team’s attention all the time, but there’s clearly moments where you’re going to have it a little bit more, right? And because we don’t lose a lot, the times that we do, we’re a little bit more attentive.
“And that’s where I say winning can be a distraction. The hardest thing to do I think is continue to win and not know you have to get better as a team. Like, you can just get comfortable, right? … I know it’s an unpopular thing to say where like sometimes if you win a game that you don’t think you deserve to win, then it takes away from the lessons that you need to learn, and sometimes you lose a game that you think you deserve to win, you know? At the end of the day, it’s all about just taking the information and applying it to the next game.”
Maintaining the right mentality is going to be the key. The Celtics have accomplished a lot, and at the same time nothing at all, in their 50 games. If they can keep the good stuff while working on the other stuff, they have a real shot at raising a banner.