It’s one of the most indelible images in NBA history: Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook, and James Harden standing courtside, with Sixth Man of the Year Harden’s arms draped over his two All-NBA teammates, looking on from the bench as the Heat wrapped up their gentlemen’s sweep of the Thunder in the 2012 NBA Finals. It was simultaneously a moment of acceptance and defiance—the Thunder were beaten, but seemed galvanized. After all, those three dudes would be unquestionably be back, and this was just part of the learning curve for the NBA’s next great team.
That trio never played another minute together. First Harden was dealt to Houston after he and the team couldn’t reach an agreement on a contract extension, then Westbrook got hurt, then Durant got hurt. Then the Thunder, once the league’s dynasty-in-waiting, were passed by an ascendant Warriors team led by their own era-defining Big Three. Durant ditched Westbrook to turn that all-time great Golden State group into basketball’s Death Star and won two rings of his own, even beating Harden’s Rockets in 2018 en route to the Warriors third title in four years. There were spinoffs (Harden and Westbrook reunited for a season in Houston, and Harden and Durant joined forces in Brooklyn), but those doomed reboots were much closer to Jurassic World than to Top Gun: Maverick. Ultimately, for all the promise of that that season, that Finals (especially OKC’s Game 1 win), and that brothers-in-arms moment in the series’ concluding moments, Westbrook, Harden, and the Thunder are still ringless, Durant joined the Galactic Empire to become a champion, and that team remains one of the greatest what-ifs in NBA history.
My point is this: Merely making the Finals is incredibly difficult. Winning a championship is harder still. And just because you get that close to earning a ring once doesn’t mean you’re guaranteed to make it back and get another shot. The Jayson Tatum/Jaylen Brown/Marcus Smart Era Celtics had already learned that first lesson after Conference Finals losses in 2018 and 2020. They learned the second lesson in a crash course with the Gandalf the White edition of the Steph/Klay/Draymond Warriors dynasty over the past two weeks. We don’t know whether or not they’ll ever learn that third lesson, but as the Thunder found out after 2012 even the most championship-caliber cores are anything but stable. That only makes the bitter pill of the last three games of the 2022 NBA Finals even tougher to swallow.
The 2017 Celtics were one of my favorite teams ever. That group, led by Isaiah Thomas during his magnificent (and, in hindsight, tragic) King in the Fourth season, was affectionately labeled the Punk Rock Celtics by Boston fans and media. They were a brash, tough collection of overachievers featuring three second round picks (Thomas, Amir Johnson, and Jae Crowder) in the starting lineup. Those Celtics were flawed, sure, but they didn’t back down from anyone…at least until LeBron and Kyrie’s Cavs barbecued them in the Conference Finals.
This year’s Celtics reminded me so much of that team, especially during their remarkable turnaround over the second half of the season, that I’d taken to internally calling them the Pop Punk Celtics. They were younger, sleeker (Tatum, Brown, and Al Horford were all 3rd overall picks, Smart was taken 6th overall, Rob Williams III a late first rounder), and angsty-er than their 2017 iteration, yet no less feisty or relentless. These C’s may have been more Hoppus than Dee Dee, but that doesn’t mean they still didn’t rock. The energy shifted once the calendar flipped to 2022, with Tatum seemingly solving a crucial part of the superstar puzzle, Brown remaining an ignitable secondary scorer, Williams finally harnessing his superhuman, time-space continuum defying potential, and Smart’s often volatile play finding a consistency befitting the heartbeat (or drumbeat) of a championship level squad. In a blink of an eye Boston went from below .500 to an Eastern Conference powerhouse with the second-best point differential in the NBA.
If there was any lingering doubt that this team was different than in years past, they put that notion to bed by running a postseason revenge gauntlet of Durant and Kyrie’s Nets, Giannis’ Bucks, and Jimmy Butler’s Heat, the three teams to eliminate them in the last three postseasons. After sweeping Brooklyn in the first round, they constantly responded to and recovered from (occasionally self-inflicted) adversity against Milwaukee and Miami. When they blew Game 5 in the Garden against the Bucks, they countered with an all-time Tatum performance in Game 6 and shot the lights out in Boston in Game 7:
When the Heat refused to go gentle into that good night, thanks to a masterful Game 6 from Butler in Boston, the Celtics got up off the mat and won Game 7 on the road. That was a special moment, even with the Celtics making things way too close for comfort at the end in a way only they could. After a 12 years (and four losses in the Conference Finals), Boston was back on basketball’s biggest stage.
But the Finals are a different beast, especially against a team like the Warriors. The Dubs finished with a good-but-not-great 53 wins, but injuries and a midseason slump obscured that they started the season 18-2 and were working their way back into form with their core of Curry, Thompson, and Green finally intact again. Golden State hadn’t just been there before, this team had excelled multiple times with a title on the line. If the Celtics were going to earn their eighteenth banner and break their tie with Lakers, they’d have to withstand the fires of the championship crucible; the place where teams are either tempered into champions or melt down under the intensity of the brightest lights. Boston had to play its best series yet, and had to look more like the team that dominated the second half of the regular season and less like the team that had its hands full with a Khris Middleton-less Bucks team and the Heat’s Walking Dead offense. The Celtics needed the Jays to rise the occasion, and not back down from Steph, Klay, and Draymond.
That’s…not what happened. The series played out like a combination of the 2012 Heat/Thunder and 2015 Cavs/Warriors Finals. The Celtics struck first with an avalanche of a 4th quarter to win Game 1, just like OKC rode a strong 4th quarter to win Game 1 in 2012. The Celtics led, somewhat improbably, 2-1 after Game 3, much like Cleveland in 2015. Unfortunately for Boston, the similarities were too strong to that ’15 series, as Thompson pointed out after the Warriors lost their final game of the season:
Curry went full Dracarys in the first half of Game 4, but Boston led at halftime anyway. Steph had another 14 points in the 3rd quarter, but the Celtics still managed to hold a four point lead after a Smart three with 5:18 left in the 4th. That would be the closest the C’s would get to winning the title. Boston’s offense sputtered like a Cosmo Kramer test drive, missing six straight shots while the Warriors surged. The Dubs closed Game 4 on a 17-3 run, and the series shifted from the Celtics seizing a stranglehold on the Larry O’Brien trophy to an even score, where it felt like the Warriors might have finally figured Boston out.
As it turns out, balancing that equation was simple: lop off the leprechaun’s head (Tatum, more on him in a second), offset Brown’s scoring bursts by swiping at the ball every time he dribbled, and dare the remaining Celtics role players to beat them. It worked like a charm. Boston reverted to their worst tendencies, the same ones that were responsible for their languid 23-24 start. The Celtics averaged 16.2 turnovers per game in the series and 18.3 turnovers per game in their four losses, including 22 giveaways in a must win Game 6 (for context the Rockets, the worst team in the NBA, averaged 16.5 turnovers per game in the regular season). Tatum, Brown and Smart had 23, 20, and 19 turnovers respectively. The Celtics, who even in their best moments had a tenuous relationship with the referees this season, totally self-combusted:
And while the Warriors feasted off the Celtics sloppy play, Boston’s offense stalled out. After scoring 56 points in the first half of Game 4, the C’s scored more than 25 points in a a quarter once for the rest of the series, and scored 20 points or fewer four times. Boston’s bench of Derrick White (-58 in 73 minutes over the last three games), Grant Williams (-46 in 45 minutes), and Payton Pritchard (-20 in 23 minutes) was more or less Homelander-ed off the face of the planet.
When the final horn sounded in Game 6, there was no question that Golden State was the better team in the series. At the same time, the self-inflicted nature of those Celtics losses (the aforementioned deluge of turnovers and referee-directed tantrums, the ice cold shooting stretches, missed foul shots, etc.) certainly made it feel like Boston quite literally gave this Finals away—even though the Warriors scheme/savvy/experience/execution was the main cause. A championship ring isn’t just given out on a whim, you have to take it, especially against a title-tested team like Golden State. After back-to-back seven game slugfests just to make it to the Finals, the Celtics just didn’t have the juice to get it done. With Steph in the midst of an all-time Finals performance (31-6-5 on 48/44/86 shooting) that would ultimately earn him his first Finals MVP, the only way Boston was going to be able to overcome their flaws was if their own All-NBA talent matched Curry blow for blow.
That brings us to Tatum. The above snapshot, of Tatum’s defeated thousand-yard stare on the bench in the waning moments of Game 6, is going to stay with me the same way that the Durant/Harden/Westbrook image did. There’s no point in sugarcoating it: Tatum wasn’t good in this series. He averaged a solid 22-7-7, sure, but he also turned the ball over nearly four times a game and shot sub-37% from the field (including a seemingly impossible 31.6% on twos). In Game 1, when his shot wasn’t falling, Tatum was a dominant playmaker, dishing out 13 assists—a record for a player in their first career Finals game—and only turning the ball over twice. The Warriors put a stop to that for the rest of the series; Tatum had only 29 assists against 21 turnovers the rest of the way.
The simple explanation is that Tatum was exhausted. He played (by a wide margin) more minutes than any other player in entire NBA this season if you add up regular season and postseason totals, let alone among players playing in the Finals:
Considering that Tatum was tasked with not only being the primary (and often only reliable) offensive creator/scorer for most of the season while also being asked to defend consistently at a high level, it’s not surprising that the minutes caught up to him. You don’t really even need to look at the numbers; just by watching him play you could see he wasn’t as explosive, preferring to settle for threes and struggling to score in traffic when he did drive to the bucket. The Warriors are relentlessly complex on both ends, requiring opponents to work hard both physically and mentally for 48 minutes. Tatum couldn’t keep up, and evaporated once things stopped going his way. Like the rest of the team, bad habits, such as avoiding contact in the paint on drives instead of powering through defenders and incessant complaining to the officials, crept back in as the series went on. Perhaps the most telling stat? In the last 5 minutes of the 4th quarters in these Finals, Tatum only mustered 3 points total, 2 fewer than seldom-used reserve center Luke Kornet. All of the Kobe Bryant homages in the world are well and good, but as Kobe learned after running Shaq out of town, you have to win for the whole “mimicking your idol” thing to actually work. Tatum carried an immense burden admirably all postseason, but he still has a level to go up to be That Guy.
There’s good news for the Celtics: Tatum and Brown (who, turnovers aside, fought every game in this series and was easily Boston’s best player) are only 24 and 25 years old, respectively, Ime Udoka looks like a home run hire after one season, and this team seems to have unlocked something this year. Overall, it was an incredibly fun and special season that saw this particular group finally make it out of the East after several near misses, and felt like a massive step in the right direction. In the Finals, they just ran into the league’s model franchise, a generational team putting the finishing touches on a dynasty. It happens. Sometimes you aren’t the main character in the story, and this season was undoubtably Steph, Klay, Draymond, and the Dubs’ story. As disappointing and frustrating as those last three games were, Boston is poised to be in the mix for the next few years, and we could be looking back on this spring as one chapter in the book of a future champ.
Don’t take that silver lining for granted, though. Title windows are finicky and can close in a blink, and the championship crucible is unforgiving. Just ask the Oklahoma City Thunder.
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[…] summers ago, after the Boston Celtics lost the 2022 NBA Finals to the Golden State Warriors, I wrote about the Championship Crucible, and the often fleeting nature of title contention windows. The core question at the heart of that […]
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