Karalis: Media day brought the madness, but the Celtics just need to play it cool to win

NBA Finals Media is a chaotic mess … relatively speaking. It’s nothing compared to Super Bowl media day, but it’s a circus compared to every other media availability during the NBA season. 

Jimmy Kimmel sent Guillermo Rodriguez to the event in full leprechaun regalia to interview players on the floor. That is if he could find any among the sea of hundreds of reporters walking around. Everywhere you look, someone has a phone and a ring light on a tripod. There are so many languages being spoken, the event should be sponsored by Duolingo. 

The environment is just different. The attention is greater. The lights are brighter. 

“Unless they change the light bulbs in the arenas, they won't be any brighter than they were the last series,” Joe Mazzulla said, downplaying the environment. He’s been preaching that things are no different now than they were in the regular season since the playoffs started. “It's just sticking to the details, the things that matter, the truth. The truth of the matter is if you don't box out, if you don't sprint back in transition, if you don't pass the ball in a two-on-one, if you don't take away the other team's tendencies, if you don't know who you're guarding, don't recognize the spacing, if you don't talk, if you don't play hard, you're not going to win. Focusing on the most simple things and the truth, the truth of the matter is you have to do those things.”

“You have to do them at a high level. Obviously the stakes are higher, that just means that the details are more important.”

Mazzulla is right, but the madness of the moment can be overwhelming if people aren’t careful. Even the most trained mind can be pulled into the abyss of noise and hot takes. With so much time in between series, the spice level on opinions has hit a level that makes ghost peppers sweat, and even if players can keep their distance, the people in their spheres often cannot. 

“I think more so than me, right, it's my mom, my grandma, my family and friends,” Jayson Tatum said. “They're more bothered by it than me. My mom took it a little tougher than maybe I did. But for me, I don't take it personal, right? Just a long break without NBA basketball, so they had to overanalyze every little thing, have something to talk about.”

We’re way past over-analysis of this series. What might happen in this series has been sliced and diced so much it might as well be part of an infomercial for Ginsu knives. Basketball is incredibly advanced but at the same time, it’s quite simple. 

“It's the details, the execution, the ability to take your mindset and your body to the next level,” Mazzulla said. “The toughest team will win. The team that makes the most plays will win. The team that can execute the details at a high level will win.”

It’s the what-ifs associated with winning that blanket this downtime like morning fog. Who has the most to gain or lose? What legacies will be changed by a championship? 

For Boston, those are the most loaded of questions. The noise around this team, and its stars, might be louder within the area code than outside it. If they lose, the calls for heads to roll will be coming from inside the house. 

“I don't think about the future or what this may mean for me down the road,” Tatum said. “As simple as it sounds, just try to stay present, stay in the moment, enjoy it, right? Keep talking about pressure, pressure, pressure... It's the NBA Finals. This shit is supposed to be fun.” 

It's supposed to be. It won’t be, though, if history repeats itself. With so much time to think about this series, the worst-case scenario is guaranteed some mental screen time. Of course they could lose. It’s the NBA Finals. They might play great and still lose to a greater talent or weird, outlier performance. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that a defensive choice Boston puts someone on the Caleb Martin All-Star team for having an out-of-character, blistering-hot shooting series. 

To their credit, the Celtics have spent most of the 96 games they’ve played being able to withstand those kinds of onslaughts. And even if one happened, like it did against Miami, they quickly righted the ship. They still haven't lost more than two games in a row. 

“You learn and grow from your experiences, from being a 25-year-old to being a 27-year-old is a big difference,” Jaylen Brown said. “We got a different team. We got a different coach, too, as well. We had Ime Udoka; now we have Joe Mazzulla. We had Marcus Smart, Rob Williams; we have Jrue Holiday, Kristaps Porzingis. Different team, different coach two years later makes a pretty big difference.”

Porzingis will return for Game 1, that much we know. How well he’ll feel and how that shows itself on the court is a mystery. 

“(It) burns inside of me, you know, not being able to be out there. But tomorrow finally I'll get the chance and I'm excited,” Porzingis said. “I did as much as I could to prepare for this moment, but there's nothing like game minutes and game experience that I'm going to get tomorrow. It will be tough to jump into the Finals like this. I did everything I could to prepare for it and we'll see tomorrow night.”

We’ll see. 

Boston’s mentality has been a hallmark of this season. Mazzulla has dipped into his bag of psychological mantras and it has worked all year long. Players have bought everything he’s sold, and it’s made the road to this point easier than most. Their toughest challenges lie ahead of them. 

The Dallas Mavericks are a damn good basketball team, complete with a megawatt talent in Luka Doncic and a savant showman in Kyrie Irving. They alone are enough to win four games in seven tries, even against the mighty Boston Celtics. It would not take a Celtics meltdown for that to happen. They are quite capable of special things. This is truly a significant challenge. 

Beating them means rising to the challenge of staying grounded; of playing the purest form of Celtics basketball to date. Everything that has happened before June 6 amounts to preparation for this moment. Every win and loss, every make and miss, every bit of perfect execution and every mistake all comes to a head on Thursday night. 

The Celtics are the better team. This is there for them to take. 

“It's going to be special,” Porzingis said. “Going to be goose bumps, for sure. I'm really, really, really looking forward to it.”