Tag: Basketball

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Basketball

Duel of the Fates

Two 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 post was simple: Had the C’s (or at least, this iteration of them) squandered their only shot at a championship? Would they get a second chance after wilting on NBA’s biggest stage?

As it turns out, the Celtics are getting another shot at a ring after all. And make no mistake, the team is treating it that way. Jayson Tatum said as much earlier this week:

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Basketball

The Championship Crucible

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.

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Basketball

Clear Eyes, Steady Hands, Can’t Lose

David J. Phillip / Associated Press

There’s a scene in The Departed where Billy Costigan (Leo DiCaprio’s character) is asked by his probation-mandated psychiatrist to describe how it feels to do what he does as an undercover cop working the Boston mob scene.

Costigan replies: “You sit there with a mass murderer. Your heart rate is jacked. And your hand? Steady. That’s one thing I figured out about myself in prison. My hand does not shake. Ever.“

There might be no better way to describe the 2021-22 Villanova Wildcats than that clip: Clear eyes, jacked hearts, steady hands. No matter how choppy the waters seem to get, these ‘Cats never get lost at sea.

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Basketball

Wildest Dreams

Aaron Doster-USA TODAY Sports

How awesome is it having March Madness back?

That’s obviously a rhetorical question, for two reasons. First, the ol’ blog post format doesn’t exactly allow for much back and forth discourse. More importantly, though, there’s no need to give a real answer here because the only response should be self-evident:

It’s truly, deeply, intrinsically, exceptionally, fucking awesome.

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Basketball

Back From The Brink

via MATTHEW J LEE / BOSTON GLOBE STAFF

At 8:10 p.m. on Wednesday, February 24th, I was convinced the Boston Celtics would never win another basketball game again. I’m not talking about this winter, or this season. I was thinking about the rest of eternity, and that the C’s were on the cusp of ceasing to exist, like the Kentucky Colonels or an unsuspecting large Dunkin’ iced around Ben Affleck. These are the thoughts one has when Danilo Gallinari turns into a human three-point tsunami in the midst of a blowout loss to the Hawks.

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