Early-Season Injuries Doesn’t Stop the Celtics From Winning

Countless injuries have put a bad dent in the Boston Celtics roster, but not on their record.

Everyone remembers the first game of the 2017-18 NBA season. Flashbacks may even bring back devastating memories of that night. The night when Gordon Hayward went up for an alley-oop pass and came down very awkwardly, ultimately sidelining him for the remainder of this season.

Most initial reactions from fans were pretty understandable with the loss of the Boston Celtics‘ star small forward: “The Celtics are done. They can’t come back from this.”

The Celtics came out the next day after their loss to the Cavaliers and still seemed to look like they were shell-shocked from the grueling injury to Hayward, as they dropped their home opener and 2 straight games to start the season.

But this team is tough, and they won’t be counted out. Boston came out and got a win in Philadelphia against the 76ers in their third game to get back into the groove of things. From that point on, the Celtics’ chemistry and defensive have gotten stronger, historically stronger, actually. This Boston defense is on track (if sustained for the remainder of the season) to have the eighth-best defensive rating since 1979-80. To think that the Celtics traded their top 2 defenders away from last season and they have improved is remarkable and really speaks volume to how great of a coach that Brad Stevens really is.

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But the injuries didn’t stop there, with Al Horford suffering a concussion against the Hawks. With the Celtics’ star big man’s concussion problem last season, where he missed around 3 weeks, in which was a scary process for both Horford and the fans. Thankfully, this concussion only held Al out for 2 games. But unluckily, 2 minutes into their game against the Hornets, another Celtics’ star went down when Aron Baynes inadvertently elbowed Kyrie Irving while trying to rebound, which knocked Irving out for the game and Jayson Tatum suffered a left ankle injury before halftime. Even though the Celtics were without their top 3 players for most of the game and their #3 pick for half of the game, Boston rallied from 18-points down to beat the Hornets in a hard-fought, gritty 11th win in a row.

It’s crazy to think that with how banged up the Celtics have been this early on in the season and they are still finding ways to win with an almost completely revamped roster.

Now that the Celtics are at 13 wins in a row, with the top-rated defense, they look ahead to their next, and the most challenging game yet, as they face the Warriors. The biggest flaw for this Boston team seems to be on the offensive end of the floor, where they are ranked in the lower half of the league in offensive rating. So both their offense and defense will take on a big test on Thursday against the defending champs as they will have to limit the top-rated offense as well as score at a similar pace as Kevin Durant and company.

This has the possibility to be one of the best games of the early season, and if Boston can hold the Warriors offense to under 100 points (which has only happened once this season), it will truly validate how historically great this defense is.

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The Celtics are off to a historic start and it seems very unlikely that they keep this up without Hayward, but if they do, this will be one of the most memorable and one of the best teams the NBA has ever seen.