A lot can happen to an NBA team in just seven days, and the Boston Celtics are no exception. That’s why we’ve started up a weekly column to capture their most interesting and entertaining happenings. They’re ranked from most relevant to least.
Top Dogs for a Day
The Cleveland Cavaliers have been terrible this month, particularly defensively. Their poor play has manifest in a disappointing 6-10 record, and the Celtics have taken advantage. Boston’s victory over Phoenix last Friday moved them into a “virtual” tie with the defending champs, and their win over Miami two nights later put them a half game up in the standings.
Many prognosticators are relatively unimpressed. LeBron James, they suggest, is such a force in any playoff series that seeding is functionally meaningless. There is truth in that perspective. James has taken his team to the NBA Finals in six consecutive seasons. His dominance should be assumed until it is disproven. Still, to question the Celtics success because the Cavs have something of a playoff trump card up their sleeve is unfair. Finishing the regular season as the best team in your conference deserves to be celebrated.
That’s not to say that Boston has locked up the top spot up. The teams are tied in the loss column, and Cleveland owns the playoff tiebreaker, which means if both teams win the rest of their games the Cavs will finish number one. All this to say, it’s still a very close race. Celtics fans should be excited that their team is in it though, Lebron-sized elephant in the room or not.
Booker’s Big Night
It’s strange when one of the most interesting things to happen to a team is the amount of points they give up to a single player, but the 70 points Devin Booker dropped are too many to ignore. Sure it wasn’t the purest form of scoring. The Suns called a couple strategic timeouts and intentionally fouled in situations that didn’t make sense just to extend the game, but Booker still had to put the ball in the basket A LOT of times. Very few of the kind of point totals that rival what Booker put up were achieved without a little chicanery. We don’t need to get in a huff about his team’s intentionality around jacking his point total up at the end of the game. Then again…
Next: Celtics Lack of Post Defense Could Haunt Them
Faux Social Media Beef
Maybe we do need to get in a huff. Jae Crowder did, at least on the internet he did. Booker posted a picture on Instagram that was essentially a re-creation of Wilt Chamberlain’s post 100 point game photo. Crowder commented on it, calling out the fact that the Suns lost the game. Booker responded by challenging Crowder’s ability to stop him from scoring, and that was pretty much the end of that. It’s probably not of any importance, but what’s the point of NBA social media accounts if not to blow things out of proportion.