The Celtics (along with new Player of the Week Jaylen Brown and new Player of the Month Jayson Tatum) begin a five-game road trip in Cleveland tonight. The trip features three of the top teams in the NBA, including the Cavs (3rd East), Nuggets (3rd West), and Suns (6th West). It also includes a Portland-Utah back-to-back that is historically rough as teams travel back a time zone and play in altitude.
So they’ll be tested.
The first test comes tonight when the Celtics take on the Cavs without Donovan Mitchell. They will also be without Max Strus and possibly Caris LeVert and Isaac Okoro. The Cavs have been scuffling after a monster run to get them from the seventh to the second seed, they are 4-5 in their last nine games and have slipped below Milwaukee into the third.
The Celtics might be without Brown and Kristaps Porzingis, both of whom are questionable tonight.
Boston is nine games ahead of Cleveland with 24 games to play, putting their magic number at 15 to eliminate the Cavs from the top spot because the Celtics own the tiebreaker.
The Bucks have gone on a run to claim the second seed at the moment. They won their sixth straight game last night, beating the Clippers. Over their last 15 games, Milwaukee has fixed their biggest issue, their defense, climbing into a second-place tie with Boston’s 109.3 defensive rating.
The most predictable element of the Bucks recovery is their transition defense. They were giving up 14.3 fastbreak points per game before the All-Star break and have given up 9.2 since, second only to Boston’s 8.6. Milwaukee’s streak does include wins over Minnesota and the Clippers, but also the Joel Embiid-less Sixers, the Bulls, and the Hornets twice.
The Celtics and Bucks have split their season series so far, so the tiebreaker is up for grabs. The Bucks have played 62 games, so the Celtics magic number to eliminate Milwaukee from the top seed is 14, but winning the tiebreaker would knock an extra game off that number.
For the record, the magic number to eliminate the Knicks and the Sixers from the top seed is nine.
The Nuggets will be the biggest test for the Celtics, and it’s a game many fans are looking at as a measuring stick. A lot of people are looking at this as an NBA Finals preview, and a loss to the Nuggets will certainly fire up the hot-take artists. Denver has climbed up to just a half-game out of first thanks to a six-game winning streak.
That streak included four monster Nikola Jokic triple-doubles:
- 21 points, 19 rebounds, 15 assists vs. Washington
- 29 points, 15 rebounds, 14 assists vs. Portland
- 32 points, 16 rebounds, 16 assists vs. Golden State
- 14 points, 14 rebounds, 11 assists vs. Sacramento
He has 19 triple-doubles this season.
The Celtics have had some recent historical success in Denver, and aside from losing the game, they were happy with the flow of their first matchup against the Nuggets.
“I thought we did a lot of really good things well on both ends of the floor,” Joe Mazzulla said after that game. “We only turned the ball over three times, 12 offensive rebounds, got one more free throw than they did. I thought we had some really, really good looks both at the rim and from the perimeter. And they made a few more plays than we did down the stretch.”
I don’t see this game as any kind of proving ground because I still think the Celtics will (and should) hold back any potential tricks they have up their sleeves for the postseason. They can’t give up their whole playbook just to please the naysayers in March. The last thing anyone should want is for Michael Malone to be wearing a championship hat in June, explaining how they’d seen what the Celtics did against them in March and recognized it so they had the counter they needed to win.
At the same time, players are human and as much as they’ve bought into the even-keeled approach Mazzulla is preaching, they probably want to prove a little something themselves. My concern is that the Denver game looming on Thursday will be a distraction tonight. The Cavs missing Mitchell will sap some of the juice from the matchup, and the game on Thursday will be too distracting to give this game proper focus.
You know, a trap game.
They have to lose sometime. They’ve won 11 in a row and they're playing some good teams. Losses to good teams happen, so we can’t expect them to be perfect the rest of the way.
We’ll see if the Celtics can avoid that. It won’t matter much in the standings since it would take a full-on collapse by the Celtics as well as perfect play from the Cavs and Bucks to overtake them, but the narratives surrounding the team would take a hit. Those don’t matter much either, but they could become distractions, and that's the last thing the team needs after playing so well lately that some are calling their championship run inevitable.