The myth about Celtic's post ASG record

[pokeKingCurtis]

I think, if people are going to """""consider everything""""" by speculating that teams weren't trying as hard, then they should also account for the fact that this team has been in constant flux for the past 2 seasons.

Rondo, Green, Jordan Crawford, Courtney Lee. There has been an incredible amount of change.

Major additions were made, major subtractions were made.

I just wonder, shouldn't those making skeptical predictions for next season take that into account too?

[Vox_Populi]

For my money, the way things went in the playoffs was much more indicative of where this team is at from a competitive standpoint.

In that we'd do as well against Cleveland as Atlanta without Korver?

[PhoSita]

I think, if people are going to """""consider everything""""" by speculating that teams weren't trying as hard, then they should also account for the fact that this team has been in constant flux for the past 2 seasons.

Rondo, Green, Jordan Crawford, Courtney Lee. There has been an incredible amount of change.

Major additions were made, major subtractions were made.

I just wonder, shouldn't those making skeptical predictions for next season take that into account too?

It's a fair point.  The team played very well considering that the roster had very little experience playing together, and roles were constantly shifting.

[greece66]

Good point, though I must say I'm not exactly excited at the prospect of that happening.

What you describe is pretty much the definition of mediocrity. 

Luckily, the Celts aren't locked into this current group so the treadmill danger is not there, but why waste a season doing that if it's not building toward something?

I understand the fear that we might become the next Atlanta; it is a legitimate concern given that we have no LBJ, Kawhi or ADavis.

Basically, Ainge has found a bright young coach, a good core of players and is hoping that he'll eventually land an all star caliber player through FA/trade/the draft.

Things can go wrong and three-four years from now we might have to confront our failure to build a contender.

But building a contender from scratch is super difficult anyway and given we just finished year two of the rebuild we are doing pretty well: you can ask Detroit, Hornets and Toronto fans whose teams have stuck in mediocrity for much longer (I won't even mention poor Utah);

IMO a couple of years in mediocrity is a necessary risk in building a contender: there is no automatic switch from tanking to contender mode. Especially given how much depends in bball on getting a real star to build around (and given the NBA is a closed and highly regulated market with 30 teams all going after the same stars, there is no risk-free method to get your building blocks.)

Therefore, patience. After all there is intrinsic value in winning games even if it does not automatically bring you closer to being a contender: experience and self-confidence for young players, building a good reputation for your franchise, making the games more fun for all of us to watch.

[Casperian]

I think you're misunderstanding what people have said about the end of season run.

It's not that people think other teams actually tried to lose games against the Celtics.

Rather, it is the notion that the last two months or so of the regular season are often treated as a sort of "garbage time" by many teams, even some teams that seemingly still have reason to win games for the sake of post-season seeding.

The last two months? Over 30 games post ASG? More like the last two weeks...

[Celtics18]

You don't think teams were looking at the Celtics as a scheduled W and played down to that expectation, particularly after our abysmal start and trading away our two best players?

Nice try, guys.  By the time we got into March and April everybody knew (or certainly should have known) that the Celtics were punching above their weight class.  The team was gelling, playing hard, and winning games.  Teams like Indiana, Toronto, Charlotte, Brooklyn and Utah--other teams that were in our weight class (to continue the metaphor) were playing to win, wanted to beat us, but couldn't.

We even managed a fantastic game against a full strength, playing to win Memphis team where we beat them.

Our team played well down the stretch of the season.  Yes, the schedule wasn't that tough, but I am absolutely not buying the "other teams laid down against us" theory.

The theory stinks of trying to explain away the fact that the team played better than you expected them to rather than just admitting they were better than you thought they'd be. 

[Celtics18]

In general there was a huge gap in how a lot of people expected the team to perform and how they did in the second half of the year. When one's expectation for an event is so dramatically different from the actual outcome, the national human psychological reaction is to search for an explanation that would explain why the expectation was so far off including attributing the event to things like luck or randomness.

Any human being does this to a degree. When you step back and go through the event step by step in this particular case it is clear that by any metric they were a good basketball the second half of the year. We can make non-fact based statements related to this like "the other teams were not trying" "we snuck up on teams that weren't expecting us to be so good" or "we out hustled them in these particular games, but that is not sustainable." These are not real actual expectations grounded in statistics, but attempts to reduce the gap between expectation and outcome. Just my thoughts on it all.

TP!!

[Celtics18]

.

If you are discounting the Celtics winnings at the end of the season due to their performance in the playoffs doesn't their opponent have to factor in?

Simply put, what should we view as more indicative of how good the Celts were last year, their record during the stretch run, or their inability to compete in the playoffs against a legitimate contender?

I think the stretch run indicates we can expect the Celts to continue to play well against teams in the bottom half of the league, while the playoffs indicate the Celts are still nowhere close to competing with the teams in the top third of the league when the games actually matter.

Overall, I think that means we can expect another middle of the road regular season record and a quick out in the playoffs. 

A major trade or a breakout season from Smart or one of the other young guys could change that trajectory, though.

But, the Cavs were in the top fifteenth of the league.  The fact that we couldn't compete with them, doesn't preclude us from competing with solid playoff teams that aren't at the very elite echelon.

If we could truly have competed with the Cavs we would have been contenders.  Nobody is saying that we were contenders, we are saying that we were a fairly good team.

[dreamgreen]

One thing I don't hear is how many games they were leading in going into the fourth quarter and still lost before ASG. After ASG the team learned how to win, which was exciting. The question is did they find lightning in a bottle or is this who they really are?

[More Banners]

Those two late wins over Cleveland....we just had no business winning.

Good game by game breakdowns, but those games themselves were the difference between 40-42 and 38-44, tied record with the 8 and 9 seeds. It's really that simple in my book.

We played better toward the end, but still a roughly .500, middle of the pack team. And that's playing the best we possibly could. Not much happened to move the needle much this offseason.

Could we have a run like we did in 2002?  Sure, it's possible. A long shot, but Obie's 3-ball offense and gritty D are the chic thing these days. Doesn't make us anything more than a middle of the road team, though.

[mctyson]

For my money, the way things went in the playoffs was much more indicative of where this team is at from a competitive standpoint.

Four games where we got crushed by the best player in the world are more indicative then more than a third of the season? I wouldn't too much stock into how we closed the regular season, but I would put almost none into the fact that we lost 4 games to Lebron.

The Celts were completely non-competitive and got swept pretty easily by a contender an NBA Finals team that lost one of its three best players a couple games into the series.

Fixd

[Celtics4ever]

I agree, other teams were tanking.   I thought we played hard when they did not.

[PhoSita]

If we could truly have competed with the Cavs we would have been contenders. 

The Celtics didn't just fail to compete with the Cavs.  They didn't win a single game.  They weren't even within a single possession in the last minute or two in any of those games. 

I don't think things would have looked much different if you slotted in any of a handful of East teams that missed the playoffs.  Pistons, Pacers, Heat, Hornets, even the Magic.  I think any of those teams would have been similarly competitive, which is to say, not at all.

[crimson_stallion]

I agree, other teams were tanking.   I thought we played hard when they did not.

The majority of our end of season games (say, the past 10 or so) were against teams that had something to play for - and we did very well in those games.

I cannot see anything whatsoever to back up the (IMHO) complete fallacy that we won games because other teams were taking.

We played games against teams that were fighting for playoff spots and final seeds, and we won many of those games.

[crimson_stallion]

"The only reason we did good at the end of last season (or the only reason we got into the playoffs) was because teams tanked against us"

This is something I hear A LOT on this forum, repeated so much that people seem to really believe it and not challenge it.

I remember the Cavs tanking a game against us, one game they played Lebron and KLove 30min each... that is not tanking, considering that most of our own players dont even play more then 30 min.  But surely, according to this narrative, more teams then that one Cavs game tanked against us and let us win, otherwise we wouldnt ever have made the playoffs, right?

Lets look, the Celtics won 10 of their final 13 games to secure a playoff spot... was it just given us to collectively by the league?

Celtics beat Brooklyn 110-91: Nets play all their starters heavy minutes and were also fighting us for a playoff spot.... No Tanking

Celtics beat the Knicks 96-92: TANKED

Celtics beat the Hornets 116-104: Hornets play all of their starters and even play Walker 40 mins as this was a must win for them... No Tanking

Celtics beat the Pacers 100-87: Pacers play all their starters and was a must win game for them... No Tanking

Celtics beat the Raptors 117-116 in OT: Raptors played Derozan 43 mins... No Tanking (Marcus Smart hit game winner)

Celtics beat the Pistons 113-103: Pistons played all their starters, their loss to the C's ended their playoff hopes mathematically... No Tanking

Celtics beat Cavs 99-90: Lebron and Love both played 30 mins and both played well, none of our starters played more then 34 minutes... I do not consider this a tank job by the Cavs, how can it be when the best player in the world is on the court... No Tanking

Celtics beat Cavs 117-78: Cavs rest all starters TANKED

After this 2nd Cavs game, the Celtics officially clinched their playoff spot and went on to win their final 2 games.

Of the all these Final 10 wins only the Cavs and Knicks tanked.  The Knicks tanked versus everyone in the league all season, so I honestly don't see how that can be a knock on us.  We got all of 1 win due to teams actually tanking that could have beat us. 

I find the narrative that we only got into the playoffs because of tanking teams to be completely false.

It's worth noting that the Knicks game really doesn't count, since they were tanking ALL season long, and against all teams they played...so doesn't contribute to the argument that we had less competition at the end of the season compared to at the start.

So technically we really only played one team that was 'tanking' to a degree that could actually support that argument.

This is why I've said multiple times that the whole 'no competition' argument is ludicrous and completely unfounded.

P.s.

TP for an excellent post.