Boston Celtics: Forget the fourth seed, Cs should gun for a top-3 finish

What a last three weeks of basketball for the Boston Celtics, huh?!

Heading into the month of April, the team was two games below .500 and had just suffered a disheartening 113-108 loss to the Dallas Mavericks to close out March. Fans were expecting the worst for the remainder of the season, and hopes of any sort of deep postseason run were all but dashed.

The last three weeks have provided some renewed hope, however.

Boston has been on fire in the month of April, winning nine of their 12 games on the month so far and taking down some quality opponents in the process. That recent run includes a six-game winning streak that vaulted the Cs back above .500 and has put this team in legitimate contention for the fourth seed in the Eastern Conference.

Even with their close loss to a Kevin Durant-less Brooklyn Nets squad on Friday night — a game where the Celtics were without Jaylen Brown, Kemba Walker, and Robert Williams as well — this team has been playing much better as of late.

Right now, the Celtics are a game back of both the Atlanta Hawks and New York Knicks for the fourth-seed, and they’re within striking distance of the three-seed.

With the Milwaukee Bucks’ recent struggles, the Boston Celtics find themselves sitting five wins back of that No. 3 spot with 12 games left on their schedule.

While my co-contributor, Nathan Rutledge, believes the No. 4 spot should be the realistic goal for this shamrocks squad come year’s end, I myself am more under the impression that pursuing the third seed should be their end game during this final stretch of the regular season.

The Boston Celtics should aspire to attain the third-seed in the standings

With their games against the Nets and Suns out of the way this week, Boston doesn’t have a very hard schedule ahead of them. In fact, according to Tankathon, the Cs have the third-easiest remaining schedule in the entire league.

Boston does have to face the Portland Trail Blazers once again as well as two contests against the Miami Heat and a match-up with the Knicks still on tap, but the majority of their remaining games come against teams at or below .500 right now.

The Boston Celtics are a combined 9-3 against the remaining 10 teams on their schedule. Though they close out the season with a three-game road trip, two of those road contests come against the Cleveland Cavaliers and Minnesota Timberwolves, both of whom are near the bottom of their respective conferences.

That’s good news for the Celtics, but what about the teams around and ahead of them in the Eastern Conference standings?

Per Tankathon, the Miami Heat — who are just a game behind Boston right now — have the seventh-easiest remaining schedule, though they still have games against the 76ers and Bucks upcoming.

The Hawks have the 11th-easiest remaining schedule but have two contests with the 76ers remaining and also have to play the Bucks, Suns, and Trail Blazers.

The Knicks have one of the hardest remaining slate of games in the league, coming in with the sixth-hardest remaining schedule on Tankathon.

Where do the Bucks, the team currently in the No. 3 spot, rank, though?

The rest of Milwaukee’s schedule doesn’t seem to be too much harder than Boston’s, as the Bucks have the eighth-easiest schedule for the last month of the regular season. While they have to play the Nets twice and still have games against the 76ers, Hawks, and Heat on their schedule, they also get to play the Houston Rockets, the Western Conference cellar-dwellers, twice and have two contests against the Bulls still remaining.

That’s not super encouraging for Boston fans, but there are still several other factors in that remain in their favor.

Thanks to a thrilling season-opening win and an impressive third-quarter outburst last month, the Celtics own the head-to-head tiebreaker with Milwaukee at 2-1. Not just this, but they also have been playing some of their best ball recently, while the Bucks have been treading water since their eight-game winning streak back in March, going 7-8 in their last 15 games.

Even with all of that, the odds aren’t in Boston’s favor of climbing up the standings to grab the three-seed for the postseason.

Per Basketball-Reference, the Celtics have just a 2.0 percent chance of earning the No. 3 spot in the East while the Bucks have a 51.3 percent chance — the overwhelming favorite right now. Those projections do like Boston’s chances of moving up into the fourth seed, though, sliding them in as the slight favorite for that spot with a 40.7 percent shot.

In short, Boston Celtics fans need to hope that the team can somehow find a way to get healthy soon and keep up their solid play while the Bucks continue to slide and lose a few games they shouldn’t.

Still, the fact we can even have this conversation and it not feel like a laughable affair shows just how far this team has come in a month.

Maybe the last stretch of regular-season action will provide even more nice surprises.

(**Submitted prior to Saturday’s slate of games**)