Day of the Beach-Head

 

The Boston Celtics are the 2024 NBA Champions.

The Celtics won Game 5 of the Finals last night, 106-88, 16 years to the day after the last time the team won a Finals series.

To get there, the Celtics beat the Miami Heat in the Quarterfinals, 4 games to 1, and then the Cleveland Cavaliers in the Semifinals, also by a 4-to-1 margin. After they swept the Indiana Pacers in the Eastern Conference Championship, skeptics claimed that no team ever had an easier path to the Finals, and that the East was a weak conference compared to the West. "Celtics are the Conference Champions?," someone posted on the Lakers' subreddit. "That's embarrassing for the East."  

"Boston Celtics fans have no idea what's about to happen to  their team," the skeptics claimed as the Celtics headed into the Finals against Luka Dončić, Kyrie Irving, and the Dallas Mavericks.

It turns out the Mavs were the ones who had no idea what was going to happen. The team ran into a brick wall of tenacious defense unlike anything they'd seen before. And that's the problem with the NBA Western Conference - the teams are all showy offense with scoring leaders putting up eye-popping numbers, but the teams don't play defense. It's never easy, but it's less difficult to put up 30 points per game when no one's guarding you.

Watch some of the highlight clips from the Finals. When the Celtics are scoring, Dončić is just standing there watching, while Kyrie is wildly waving his arms around in random directions, often nowhere near the scoring player or the ball. It looks like he's playing D, but he's defending ghosts.  And you can say that Dončić at least got downcourt - I'll grant him that much - but he's just standing there slack-jawed, hoping the laws of physics kick a random rebound or an errant pass in his direction.

The Mavs did play defense in Game 4 and it won them the game, 122-84, but it was only out of desperation after they'd fallen behind to the Celtics, 0-3, were facing elimination, and coach Jason Kidd was probably screaming at them in the locker room to play some D, goddammit!

I've heard Stephen A. Smith, Charles Barkley, and the rest of the Inside the NBA pundits all claim the Celtics didn't have that championship spark in them. Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown are nice guys, they claimed, likeable persons who you'd be glad to have a beer with, but they didn't have that mean-ass competitive spirit that defined champions like Larry Bird and Michael Jordan. "They don't have the dog in them," as Barkley put it. They're nice guys, they claimed, but nice guys finish last.

Tatum and Brown proved them wrong. They showed that it's possible to win the big games without having a borderline personality. Sometimes, the good guys do win and personally, I'd rather have another NBA title banner than a sociopath superstar.

Anyway, here's to the Boston Celtics, the 2024 NBA Champions.