Boston Celtics

3 reasons the Celtics are a playoff threat, and 1 reason for caution

The Celtics have won eight games in a row. How seriously should we take them?

Celtics
The Celtics have won eight in a row. How seriously should we take them? photo by Matthew J Lee/Globe staff

By Tom Westerholm

5 minutes to read

After rallying to beat the Hawks on Sunday, the Celtics have won eight games in a row — the longest active winning streak in the NBA. Their starters are obliterating teams even after slow starts in their last two wins. They reportedly got their primary target at the trade deadline. If the old axiom that “defense wins championships” holds true, they will face the Warriors in the NBA Finals.

That’s crazy, of course … right? On Dec. 28, after a brutal loss to an incredibly short-handed Timberwolves team — which Ime Udoka called “one of the poorest losses of the year — we wrote that “We can’t call that loss ‘shocking’ or ‘inexplicable’ because it was neither,” and man, did we mean it. The Celtics were embarrassing themselves semi-regularly against truly mediocre competition.

Advertisement:

Still, throughout their early-season struggles, the Celtics did themselves one big favor: They hung around .500. Writing them off entirely wasn’t possible if only because they still had plenty of talent to turn the season around.

Now they’ve done it. The Celtics are no longer embarrassing — they are sixth in the Eastern Conference, just 2.5 games out of third and just 4.5 games out of first. So how seriously should we take them?

Here are a few reasons to take them seriously as a playoff challenger, and a big one to be cautious (this, of course, is not an exhaustive list for either argument).

Suddenly, the Celtics are resilient.

Remember when big leads were a punch line? The 2022 iteration of the Celtics is the opposite — they hold their leads, and they rally when they are behind.

Advertisement:

Look no further than Sunday’s game against the Hawks. Playing at 2 p.m. on Super Bowl Sunday, the Celtics came out flatter than Jaylen Brown’s rookie-year haircut and lapsed into all of their worst habits. Marcus Smart chucked up bad shots early in the clock. Brown tried to do too much and committed two of his four turnovers in a 10-second span trying to attack Hawks defensive ace DeAndre Hunter 1-on-1. Jayson Tatum took it upon himself to isolate against Hunter as well, and got nothing.

Then the Celtics course-corrected. Smart didn’t shoot again until the fourth quarter (he took four shots in the fourth, two of which were late in the shot clock) and dished out seven assists. Brown was 4-for-5 from the floor and scored 11 points during the pivotal third quarter when the Celtics outscored the Hawks 42-23. Tatum scored 25 points in the second half and finished with 38.

The Celtics followed a similar mold two days earlier taking on the Nuggets: A double-digit deficit turned into a hard-fought victory down the stretch.

“A couple weeks ago, months ago, early on in the season, a game like this probably would have gotten away from us,” Smart said after the win over the Nuggets. “We wouldn’t have responded the way we did.

Advertisement:

“We just stayed with it. We didn’t let anything fluster us. We kept trusting one another.”

The Celtics do seem to trust each other a little more — an odd phenomenon given that Smart, Brown, and Tatum have played together since 2017, and Robert Williams joined the team a year later. Still, they acknowledge the challenges early in the season of playing for a new coach and a new staff.

“Everybody would have liked for us to play like this out of the gate,” Tatum said. “We made efforts but the reality is things take time and obviously, there is a lot of losses we wish we could have back and things we wish we could change. We were all just adjusting to something new, a whole new coaching staff, kind of a new brand of basketball a little bit.”

Jayson Tatum still hasn’t had a huge stretch.

While the Celtics floated around .500, most optimists pointed to Tatum’s 3-point shooting as a reason to hold out hope. After all, it seemed very unlikely that a career 38 percent 3-point shooter would continue to shoot 32 percent from deep, and so much of Tatum’s game revolves around his 3-point shooting.

Tatum hasn’t erupted yet, but the Celtics are still rolling. In January, Tatum averaged 27 points per game but shot just 33.3 percent from behind the arc. In February, Tatum is averaging 23.2 points per game and is shooting just 29.2 percent from deep. His usage has fallen significantly as well.

Advertisement:

Doesn’t matter. The Celtics are 16-6 since the calendar flipped — the third-best winning percentage in the NBA over that stretch and the best in the Eastern Conference.

If players like Giannis Antetokounmpo and LeBron James are finesse-power players — trucking their way to the rim and dishing when the defense collapses — Tatum is a power-finesse player. His game is built on 3-pointers, footwork, and a handle, but he’s also increasingly comfortable simply overpowering big men like Hawks center Onyeka Okongwu.

Tatum can score 40 points on any night, and that matters in the playoffs. Still, the Celtics have shown they can win even when he doesn’t, and that’s a great sign.

The Celtics have inflection points.

Narrative psychology is a field that “investigates the value of stories and storytelling in giving meaning to individuals’ experiences — shaping their memory of past events, their understanding of the present, and their projections of future events — and in defining themselves and their lives.”

To the Celtics’ immense credit, they turned their 2021-22 season around without an obvious change in the narrative — a six-game winning streak before the trade deadline has only extended since.

Still, adding Derrick White to the roster helps. White is a starter-caliber player who closes games and boosts the perimeter defense. He showed shooting flashes in his debut, and even when he is off — 4-for-14 against the Hawks — he does a lot of little things. His arrival felt like an inflection point, even if the real inflection point was simply getting the entire roster healthy. The tandem of White’s arrival and a healthy group seems to have changed the narrative enormously.

Advertisement:

We joked at the top about the “defense wins championships” axiom, and maybe it is a little difficult to imagine a showdown between the Celtics and Cavaliers — the two best defensive teams in the East — for a trip to the Finals. But it’s a whole lot easier to imagine a Celtics-Cavaliers Eastern Conference Finals on Feb. 14 than it was on Dec. 25, in part because of the Celtics’ defense, in part because of their stars, but also because they added a new variable that fits perfectly.

Still:

Health matters a lot

Celtics players have missed a lot of games this season with various ailments and injuries, but the team is rolling ever since they got their full roster together. That’s great news for anyone who thought the Celtics were a better group than the middle-of-the-road play-in team that stumbled to a sub-.500 record in 2021, but we are yet to see what an injury to any of the core four does to the chemistry.

Conclusion

The Celtics clearly aren’t favorites in the Eastern Conference — that distinction belongs to the defending champion Milwaukee Bucks. The Sixers just acquired a former MVP in James Harden and already employ an MVP candidate in Joel Embiid. The Heat, Bulls, and Cavaliers are formidable. The Nets have lost 11 in a row, but you can’t write off Kevin Durant even if both of his co-stars are notoriously unreliable.

Still, the Celtics are a team nobody wants to face in the playoffs. Their defense is tough. Their stars are young and hungry.

Advertisement:

If nothing else, the Celtics seem to be on an upward trajectory once again.

To comment, please create a screen name in your profile

Conversation

This discussion has ended. Please join elsewhere on Boston.com