The Celtics are great at exploiting other teams’ weaknesses. They expertly pick at weak defenders or less-developed areas of opponents’ games to get wide-open shots and go on big runs. They can be punishing. Ruthless, even.
But there's just something about the Indiana Pacers.
The Pacers didn’t start this season particularly well, but no one should be surprised that they’d snap back into form against the Celtics. They were a thorn in Boston’s side during the regular season and Joe Mazzulla will tell everyone that the Eastern Conference Finals sweep could have been a seven-game series with only a handful of small things going differently.
Indiana might not finish this season with better records than New York, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, or Cleveland, but the last thing the Celtics want to see is another matchup with Indiana five or six months from now.
“There was a different attitude, a different vibe,” Rick Carlisle said after the game, explaining why his team played so differently than they had over their disappointing first few games.
Of course there was. The Pacers clearly have confidence that they can make things tough on Boston. They have shown over and over that they have what it takes to hang with the Celtics. They had Boston on the ropes multiple times in the playoffs. But proving they can hang is one thing. Now they’ve proven they can win. And this is where a dangerous team for the Celtics becomes even more so.
The Pacers’ edge against Boston is their pace and unpredictable nature. I swear I saw them run a three-man weave at one point. They run every chance they get, forcing cross-matches and confusion. Inevitably, they get defenders turned around, and then cutters attack from all angles to get easy baskets.
That's tough to guard on a night where everyone is fully engaged. When the Celtics are clearly not themselves, it turns into a 24-point deficit.
“I thought their speed, their pace, just they were step ahead of us,” Mazzulla said. “It wasn't our best night. I thought we missed a ton of layups. Thought we had some rebounds with two hands that we didn't get, that we tapped out. So we just didn't play our best. And Indiana played great.”
Well, they mostly played great. Just like in Game 3 of the Eastern Conference Finals when the Celtics came back from 18 down to win, the Pacers got away from doing all that stuff Boston hates to defend.
“We're not an ISO team. We're not suited or set up to be an ISO team,” Carlisle said. “And if you slow down against Boston, this is what they're capable of. They're capable of striking very fast. We saw it last year …
“Maybe it's a little counterintuitive. As the game gets shorter at the end, a lot of people feel like the game just intuitively needs to slow down. But the truth is, for some teams, you need to continue to play fast, and even faster if you can. And so that's that's the case with us. We had to survive a tornado out there, really. But guys showed a lot of character, a lot of guts in the end.”
There's something to be said about pulling through when the same thing that happened before happens again. Suffering through “Oh no, not again” but finding a way to “Oh! No! Not again!” does wonders for a team’s psyche.
“We had four games against those guys where we felt like three of those were the same situation as right now,” Pascal Siakam said. “So I think it was just a good learning and growth experience for us (to) put ourselves in that situation again, with the turnovers, and not taking care of the ball. And to be able to come out of it with a win. It’s big. It's huge.
“It shows growth because we know that in those Conference Finals games, we had some games just like that, where if we took care of the ball a little bit more, or we made some big shots, that we could have won the games.”
They could have, but didn’t. Now they did, which means now they know they can.
There's not much to make of Boston falling to 4-1. These kinds of games happen in the regular season. We can very easily say an even mediocre shooting night from Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown, and just a good game from Bennedict Mathurin instead of one of the best games of his life, changes this result dramatically. Maybe Siakam having anything less than the best 3-point shooting night of his career would have made things different.
But that stuff happens.
What the Celtics need to understand is that Indiana not only has the confidence to know they can make things tough for Boston. They also now have the confidence, and the blueprint, to finish the job.
Indy has always been a pain for Boston, but the boost they got from this game could turn them into a problem down the line.