Slax wrote:Captain_Caveman wrote:Slax wrote:
It matters quite a bit. The comparison to the Knicks was designed to suggest that the Celtics belong to some category of teams whose regular season success is somewhat meaningless or illusory because it is purely a result of health and effort and therefore they are likely to fail in the playoffs the same way the Knicks did. But pretty obviously we should not be thinking of a team that beats other teams by 7 points a game as just being a slightly better version of a team that beats other teams by 2 points a game. The Celtics showing themselves to be an actually good team in the regular season - as born out by the amount the score against other teams and the amount other teams score against them - should significantly influence our estimation of how likely they are to win games in the playoffs. That's true even if the regular season success was partly a function of health and effort.
Well, things are going their way since I posted that, but I still don't know.
Fwiw I would have had the same response before the series started, I just didn't see the post before then. Everything in my response has nothing to do with how this Nets series has gone so far.
One bucket from having gone down 0-1 in this series, and I think it was more than partly health and effort. Other teams in the same win range as us had far lesser health and in many cases added major players towards the end of the season on top of getting healthier. I think it is fair to ask if this team lacks a certain gear.
Kyrie hits a bunch of crazy contested shots in the literal game of a lifetime - almost nobody ever has a performance like that. In spite of that, the Nets
lose the game by one point. To me, that shows an impressive level of defensive dominance, which they sustained through game 2. To you, that shows that the team isn't really that good and they just got lucky they hit a buzzer-beating game winner after putting up more effort than their opponent (who I guess wasn't trying in the playoffs?).
Likewise, in the regular season, the Celtics beating teams by 7 points per 100 over the course of the full season (and by much more in the second half of the season!) to me shows that they were a relatively dominant regular season team that deserves respect in the playoffs, and that their lower-than-expected record from losing a bunch of close games early is primarily a reflection of bad in-game luck and very obvious improvements that happened later in the season. By your telling, this can be explained almost exclusively by exceptional health and being regular season try-hards. Also, all the teams clustered around them in wins that had way less impressive point differentials should be held in higher esteem because they didn't try as hard and had more missed games to injuries but ended up with a similar number of wins.
I'm not a pollyanna. There are a bunch of weaknesses in this Celtics team, such as lack of shot creators and outside shooters, which is likely to come back to bite them this playoffs. I'm also not saying the Celtics weren't the lucky beneficiaries of good health, or that hitting that game-winning buzzer beater wasn't lucky - there are a lot of different forms of luck, and the Celtics have been a definitely been the beneficiary in some ways this season and postseason. They could lose in the first round (although it's starting to get unlikely). They could lose in the second. They could lose in the conference finals. This is not some sort of unbeatable juggernaut by any stretch of the imagination - they are a flawed team that is currently benefiting from being good in a year when all other teams in the league are also flawed.
But I object to you interpreting everything the Celtics accomplish in terms of luck and effort, when the actual empirical evidence shows they are genuinely a very talented team that deserves to be respected at this point. The comparison to last year's Knicks - a team that didn't win as many games, narrowly beat most of their opponents, and then went on to have a predictably poor playoffs - is silly and undeserving. The metrics told us the Knicks weren't that good heading into the playoffs. The Celtics are categorically different.
Sorry if that wasn't clear. I'm not saying the Celts were lucky to win Game 1. My point is that it was a verrrrry close game between two good teams and that we absolutely could have gone down 0-1. Back to our previous posts, I do think they were lucky, for once, to be as healthy as they were in the regular season, and that they almost certainly played harder than other teams that were often load managing or dealing with injuries in many games.
FWIW, having among the best health in the league is also actual empirical evidence. People here mad about missing 14 games of Jaylen early and two weeks of Rob late, but go right down the list with other top teams and contrast. The Warriors, Suns, Grizz, Heat, Bucks, Nets all had star players missing waaaay more games than ours did. Guys who are not only far better than Rob, but in most cases much better than Jaylen as well. And yet, teams like the Warriors, Suns, Heat, and Grizz were still right there with us both defensively and offensively over the course of the full season in the end. The Warriors core 3 played like 11 total minutes together this year and now they are healthy. The actual empirical evidence doesn't account for that. Like, at all.
Since a couple of you are pointing to their record in close games, a few old time sports adages here. #1, "You don't need to watch a whole basketball game, just the last two minutes." #2, and closely related to that is, "Good teams win close games."
Much of the success of the Spurs and Pats over a 20+ year stretch was their having the top-tier situational awareness and ability to execute under during at end of game situations. Clock management, do you have a foul to give, get the 2-for-1, how to use timeouts, how to run two-minute drill, coaches who can make the correct decisions quickly, and players who can execute big plays under pressure. Two different sports, but a common theme. With due respect to the small sample size, I don't think anyone should even imply that winning or losing close games is about luck.
You can be a good team regardless, but the deeper we go into the playoffs, all the teams are good. If that is actually a weakness of this team, it is not one that is conducive to playoff success.
I mean, we get to find out either way. But in the larger sense, I am just not as far upfield as a lot of folks here. Someone just compared us to the Jordan Bulls defensively a few posts ago. Even as the long-ruling President of Smartistan, I don't think you get to do that this early in the game, personally.
