They’ve been shooting well all playoffs…
Is this a random made up post? They actually shot really awful against the Knicks. Like 29% for the series. They shot 51% last night. This is the difference between the best and worst shooting team in nba history (by a lot)
You're ignoring the Bucks series. The Heat shot lights out from 3 during the Buck series - well above their season average. Their shooting percentage regressed during the Knick series, but they've proven they can sustain good shooting over multiple games.
So you ignore the Knicks series because it doesn't fit the narrative?
Not gonna lie, I largely ignored the knicks/heat series but the fact that they didn’t shoot well and rather easily beat the knicks should actually scare you more.
you do realize they shot 41% against the bucks. good numbers, but not the 51% you guys are arguing they can sustain. thats a 10% jump.
so you ignored that series yet are going to make predictions based off of it?
I watched that series. they missed Randle with an injury for one game and when he came back he was never the same player. The Knicks are not a good team. they were basically Brunson. they really cant compare to the celtics talent level. and they won two games in that series, and most were close so wouldn't say they were easily beaten.
but okay, the series is over why even watch? we should just turn off our TV's and anoint the heat the greatest ever.
this board is annoying whenever the celtics lose....It was just two weeks ago I was hearing from Posters how Harden can easily put up 30-40 a game and the celtics are doomed. and now the celtics are doomed because Miami will shoot 51% from three for a whole series and celtics will make no adjustments..
and yet we were still within 4 at the end. even after losing the 3rd quarter as bad as we did. If Tatum didn't turn the ball over three straight times who knows what happens.
Um I still give the Celtics a really good shot at winning the series I just do think people are underrating Miami and them winning this series wouldn’t surprise me at all..Celtics SHOULD still win in 5 but won’t.
Also you saying the Knicks aren’t a good team is annoying, they were pretty darn good against us this year and frankly think the Knicks beat the teams we have played in the playoffs so far, just saying.
If we are brutally honest with ourselves, we have underrated every team we have played in the playoffs...we underrated Atlanta because they had to go through a play-in, we underrated Philly because we beat them 3-1 in the regular season and now we're underrating Miami. So these losses always come as a shock and generate considerable self-flagellation and introspection on the forum. Or maybe we're just overrating our own team 
It's probably the bolded. The #7 and #8 seeds this season aren't amazing teams, they're simply teams that the Celtics are too lazy to play consistently hard against. Just like Game 1 against Philly: it's not like the 76ers without Embiid are a good team, but we managed to sleepwalk through a loss against them, too.
We don't have the "stomp on their necks" mentality. We were getting there with Ime, and I think if we don't have a hobbled Timelord last year we hang a banner. But, we're back to playing nice.
It won't happen, but I'd love to see how this team would do with Thibs as the defensive coach, or maybe a taskmaster like Carlisle as head coach.
Well, maybe - but even though I'm an adherent to sample size, when the C's are on they are far and away the best team remaining in the playoffs - and far and away the best team in the NBA. As we've discussed across a bunch of threads, it's the distance between the highs and the lows that can make the C's so frustrating to watch: they're an unnecessarily high-risk, high-reward team, because the talent is there for them to be low-risk high-reward (like Pop's Spurs with Duncan, the Heatles, our Big 3).
I don't think it's laziness, but I do think it's a quirk of our roster.
I think the main issue leading to us overrating our team is a) people generally tend to overrate their own team due to familiarity bias; and b) the delta between a good Celtics performance and a bad one is consistently pretty high for a supposedly great team. When we're good, we're really good and it makes people think that we can beat anyone - but when we're bad we lose in infuriating ways to teams that shouldn't have a chance against us at our best. If you think about the historically great teams, not only did they play at a consistently high level, but when they played poorly (which every team does) it was rarely really bad, and when it was they usually fixed it the next game so it was never bad for long, or for that often. The delta between their good and bad over time was pretty small.
In our case it seems like we have really bad performances a lot more frequently than those historically great teams, which is probably what is really annoying, because we've seen them at their best but they can't seem to sustain it. We rate them on their best, but their worst happens quite often and so the reality is they're really not as good as their best suggests, but neither are they as bad as their worst shows. So they're kind of in the mean of that, but we tend to rate them at their best so when they fall short we want to tear our hair out. That's why I don't get that upset at these shockers anymore, because I've baked it into my calculus that they will have them more often than I would like. Maybe even evey 3 games or so 
I think my own frustration comes from comparing this year's team to last year's. This team is capable of a sustained run of excellence. There's nothing baked into the DNA of this team that says that low-effort and terrible defense is just one of those things that is going to happen.
That's simply not true. After an adjustment period to Ime, that team killed opponents. It wasn't until Timelord went down -- and then came back, hobbled -- that we struggled. Yes, in the Finals we beat ourselves with turnovers, but it wasn't because of lazy defense or lack of focus.
In last year's playoffs -- despite Timelord being out or hobbled -- We gave up 115+ points once. This year, it's eight times! We gave up 102.0 points per game last playoff season (107.0 points per 100 possessions). This year it's 109.4 points per game (112.8 per 100 possessions). Our defensive eFG% against was .501; this playoffs it's .522. Last year's team gave up 33.2% 3PT%; this team concedes 36.4% 3PT%. Last year we played the 3rd, 10th, 11th and 17th ranked offenses. This year it's 4th, 7th and 25th so far.
Those are effort stats. The personnel is less talented this year, but the results are markedly worse.
Topic: Is this just wishful thinking (Read 3875 times)