The Celtics have a 10-game lead in the East with 14 games to play. If Milwaukee goes perfect the rest of the way, they’d get to 58 wins. Boston is already at 54, so even if the Bucks do the impossible, Boston can finish the season 5-9 and still hold on.
The magic number to lock up the top overall seed is nine, so that race is almost over too.
The Celtics have some room for error.
That makes convincing someone like Jayson Tatum to take a night off a little easier. The TD Garden crowd got to see their team win by 25 without Tatum, or Al Horford, Jrue Holiday, and Sam Hauser for that matter, so everyone in green left that building happy. Especially some of the guys who don’t get a chance to play very often.
The Celtics have a rare opportunity in front of them to work out the kinks with some of their more … unusual … combinations. The Celtics domination all season long is giving them a few weeks to sprinkle in some work on contingency plans, just in case.
“These are opportunities that we have to go … in case we need them for whatever reason,” Joe Mazzulla said after blowing out the Pistons. “Each guy is learning how to play with different lineups, and it’s allowing us to go down the path of different things that we need to have ready for different situations. I think we’re grateful for that, and the guys do a great job of kind of adapting to that.”
They should be grateful. This is a luxury not many teams are afforded in a regular season.
The Celtics still have to win some games, which will come naturally as they play their full team the appropriate minutes together to ramp them up for the playoffs. Their main players still have to be physically prepared for what the playoffs are about to bring. But they will also have plenty of opportunities to rest certain players and mix up lineups to pick up some valuable data points.
“Depending on matchups in the playoffs, you never know (who will play),” Kristaps Porzingis said. “There’s going to be different situations and it’s good that we have the flexibility and also these kind of moments where guys are sitting out and we can try out these different things. So it will definitely just add more to our toolbox.”
You can bet the ankles, shoulders, and knees listed on the injury report today will disappear before Wednesday night’s game against Milwaukee, but then suddenly reappear over the weekend in Detroit and Chicago. Mazzulla will take the opportunity to try something new, like when he started Luke Kornet next to Porzingis against Detroit.
Porzingis and Kornet have played 72 minutes together over 16 games. Over the first 15 games, they averaged four minutes per game together on the floor. They played 11 together in this game against the Pistons. And because you never know if the Celtics will need to go to a double-big lineup like this in May and June, getting the opportunity in March to work through the rough patches against NBA competition is invaluable.
“It’s an adjustment, of course,’ Porzingis said. “I’m not going to lie, me and Luke together, it was like we were running to the same spots all the time, doing the same thing, so the spacing was a little bit not perfect early on in the game but we figured it out.”
That clunkiness is to be expected, but now they have that shared experience. They can reference those awkward moments and lean on the lessons learned to make the next time they play together a bit easier rather than learning on the fly against a playoff opponent.
It also keeps this part of the schedule interesting to the team. They are being challenged in a new way, so they have to keep working through new problems rather than fighting the boredom of another ho-hum blowout. This is the NBA equivalent of first-world problems, but this is the situation they're in.
By tossing out different combinations of unfamiliar lineups, everyone has to stay focused to work through new issues. Porzingis and Kornet started out bumping into each other like high schoolers trying to slow dance for the first time, so they and the rest of the guys on the floor had to find out how to get back into rhythm. There was no time to sleepwalk because an issue needed to be diagnosed and addressed.
“It’s really just fun,” Mazzulla said. “It’s fun to find different formations, different spacings, different things you can go to get guys the ball where they need to get it. So I think that’s probably the most fun part about it.
Payton Pritchard might be the one player most connected to all of these different combinations. He’s the one guy on this roster who gets spot starts and real rotation minutes while also finding himself in garbage time minutes. He, more than anyone on the roster, has playing experience with just about everyone. So he understands that these minutes now, as weird and rough as they might be, are part of the bigger picture.
The more rough edges that can get sanded down now means the more easily all the pieces will fit whenever you need them to.
“It's basketball at the end of the day,” he said. “But I think it's a good opportunity for a lot of us that you don't see the day in, day out, the work we put in one through 15, especially the bench guys. For them to get an opportunity to come out and show. what they're capable of doing, it's good cause I think we're a very deep team and I think people are starting to realize that.”