The Boston Celtics have been one of the biggest surprises the league has had to offer in 2019-20. What should we expect over the final stretch of the season?
With a win tonight against the Houston Rockets, the Boston Celtics could come out 6-2 in what looks like one of their toughest stretches of the regular season.
A slew of outings that included only Western Conference competition, six road games and with signature wins over the Oklahoma City Thunder, Los Angeles Clippers and Utah Jazz on a back to back; the latter being on the road.
A surprise campaign mixed with Jayson Tatum morphing into a raging fireball for the last month and a half has made this quite the memorable season in contrast to last year.
With 24 games left, Boston’s schedule doesn’t appear to be too hard. After tonight, they have a Brooklyn-Cleveland back to back to start in what appears to be their last challenging stretch of the season.
March 6th-25th schedule goes like this:
- March 6th vs Utah
- March 8th vs OKC
- March 10th @ Indiana
- March 12th @ Milwaukee
- March 13th vs Washington
- March 15th @ Chicago
- March 18th vs New York
- March 20th @ Toronto
- March 21st @ Brooklyn
- March 23rd @ Washington
- March 25th @ Memphis
Five of these 11 games are against teams under .500, with Memphis teetering on the edge of being number six. There are some sneaky back to backs in Brooklyn and at home vs a Wizards team that is capable of dropping 150 points in a random regular season game.
The headliner coming on the 12th in Milwaukee in what will surely fuel some talking head’s agenda regardless of the victor.
Finally, the last ten games feature seven home games for the Boston Celtics, and only four vs above .500 competition (Bucks, Pacers, Heat x2.)
If the Celtics go 17-7 the rest of the season (on pace with their current win percentage), It’ll put them at 58-24. This would be nine wins better than last year and the best mark of the Brad Stevens era.
Boston currently sits one game behind the Toronto Raptors, placing them third in the conference. Fivethirtyeight projects them to finish with 58 wins, while Toronto hits 57; placing the Celtics as the two seed in that scenario.
Finishing second proves to be important for three reasons. It would give the Celtics home court advantage over the Raptors in a seven game series, it allows them to avoid Milwaukee until to conference finals, and it ensures a weaker first round opponent (Brooklyn, Orlando, Washington) over who they’d likely face as a three seed (Miami, Philadelphia, Indiana.)
At this time last year the Boston Celtics were 37-25, and at the tail end of a four game losing streak with more questions than answers.
Now, everyone is happy, the players are having fun and all we have to do is sit back and see if they can make it to June.