There can still be hope for the Boston Celtics. But their best chance of claiming another banner is firmly in the past.
Of course, yes, of course – Boston can technically still win this series if they keep the home field in a game on Thursday night, 6 and then return to San Francisco and then post W on the Warriors’ home floor on Sunday night’s game. 7.
However, they are on the verge of elimination because they have betrayed the surge of resilience and breaking star protection that brought them here. Excluding and passing by, Kevin Durant, Janice Adetokunmpo and Jimmy Butler are impressive victories. Dealing with Steph Curry – and the real, brutal, rare, surprising effect of trying to win an NBA title – is something else entirely.
Call it pressure. Call it fear. Call it the moment that separates the talented from the winners, the professionals from the champions. Whatever it is, he has beaten the Celtics in the last two games as much as Curry and Co.
Especially in Game 4, when the Warriors offered the Celtics victory on a silver platter. Jason Tatum, Jaylan Brown and their teammates just couldn’t stand it.
Like Match 4, the Celtics entered the fourth quarter of Game 5 with one point after a tough, tenacious race. Unlike Game 4, however, Curry did not stand up to defeat them alone. They did well.
In Game 4, Boston took the lead in the 3-1 series and all that probably meant. Then Curry happened, and on the other side of the 17-3 Warriors series, to end this game, we sat at 2-2. Fine. The series is still a lot. Fighting GOATs means you’ll probably have to deal with these great performances; the key is how to withstand the storm. But the failure in Game 5 came with Curry definitely deadly: 16 points, 0-for-9 nights from the 3-point line and no heroism in the fourth quarter.
Curry could have beaten them a few days earlier, but it was only the Celtics, again nervous, nervous and insecure, beating themselves. They coughed four turns in the fourth quarter. They fired 27 percent off the field and rotted 25 percent behind the arc. Tatum and Brown combined 2 of 9 from the field. They broke.
To win the next two games, they will have to do much more than overcome Warriors and his great star of all time. The Celtics will have to overcome something in themselves that has turned the NBA’s best team into a shell of its own in the fourth quarter of their last two games.
And their failures have come against a different kind of Warriors team than those that have competed for and won NBA championships in the past – smaller.
There is no Kevin Durant to save the Warriors in a curry out of the night. Clay Thompson wavered between mediocre and good, Draymond Green between awful and so on. For a long time, Jordan Poole has once again become something very similar to the G-League. Andrew Wiggins was great, of course, but if you can’t beat an NBA Finals team on a night when Wiggins is the best player, you’re probably in big trouble.
Curry is Curry, yes, except for the unusually free night Monday. But Curry has historically reacted to bad games in the playoffs with effective nights of dominating, glorious attack.
“It’s good for us now,” Green said after the game, after seeing this story before. “He was 0-for-9 out of 3. He’s going to be furious in Game 6, and that’s exactly what we need.”
There are many X and Os that you can study, many numbers that can tell the story of the large sample size and statistical realities of both teams. There are game plans that Boston can and should make to replicate what they’ve done well for the long stretches of the series they need to win, and so on.
But as two-time NBA champion Isa Thomas told me, all of these things go out the window when the pressure rises to a maximum. “The pressure is real,” he said. “Some players, some great players can handle it. Some can’t.”
But the real answer to how Boston wins this thing is simple and twofold: Don’t let Curry beat you and don’t beat yourself.
On the first: Success. Curry, as I wrote, will probably end his career as an all-time Top 5 player, an all-time talent too often underestimated, earning what he deserves long after. But he is the best player on the floor in this series, he showed that he can win a match if he has to, and in game 5 his teammates began to offer help that he could use all the time. Curry, Green said, will be furious Thursday night and dangerous.
But the second point is why this series feels complete: no team can win a championship if the closer they get to it, the faster they fade. And the Celtics were a bunch of nerves, worries and bad play in the moments when the ring closed – turning the ball, playing hot potatoes, lack of a star, ready to take advantage of the moment.
Tatum was out of much of this series. Brown had several grim second halves. Marcus Smart has not filled this gap. And you can ask Al Horford and Derrick White to save the situation in the fourth quarter of the NBA Finals only once – and once you feel like once too much.
The Celtics have a chance on Thursday night and as head coach Ime Udoka pointed out, they were in that position, losing 3-2 and facing elimination earlier this season against last year’s champions, the Milwaukee Bucks.
But playoff basketball is about adjustments, and the one Boston needs to make is one we haven’t seen yet: the ability to take a series, under the strongest sense of hope and fear, when something as rare as championship is presented.
We’ve seen enough to know that Steph Curry can. Meanwhile, the Boston Celtics are still trying to figure out how to compete with him when it’s most important.
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