Why the Boston Celtics Won't Win the NBA Title

Unless they do. Then, they will.

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I’m a Celtics skeptic, always have been. “Hater” is such an ugly word. I think it mainly came from Jayson Tatum being automatically put ahead of Devin Booker by ESPN et al when he came into the league in 2017, and that was peak petty Booker-fan season. So, I’ll try and be as fair as possible while giving my few reasons why I’m skeptical of the Celtics winning it all, even though it can totally happen.

I have 2 reasons which give me pause about the Celtics reaching the top of Mount O’Brien:

1. They don’t have a certified* super-duper star.

2. They play a variance-prone offensive style.

I thought I had a third, but I don’t think so. They’re really good, and probably have the most pure talent in their starting 5. But here we go.

1. They lack an official championship-level* best player.

I added an asterisk to both of these descriptions of the player that they lack because I mean something specific. The number of teams that have won the championship without a regular season MVP or a finals MVP as one of their best players are few and far between, and usually come from one city. Here’s the list since 1980:

• 1981 Celtics

• 1989 Pistons

• 2004 Pistons

Darvin Ham, Darko Milicic… legends. What a crazy team.

This feels like lazy analysis, since we’re going with a pretty small set of data on this point, but it’s pretty amazing that the consistent predictor of winning the finals (not necessarily just playoff success, since that’s a lot more subjective) is just having one of the best guys. Also, the league has changed over the decades in significant ways, but this is a longer streak of champions that meet this criteria than ever before.

Here are the teams that can win it all, if this has to be true:

• Nuggets (Jokic)

• Clippers (Kawhi, Harden, not necessarily Russ since he’s not one of their best players but shout out to Russ!!)

• Warriors (Curry)

• Suns (Durant and the rightful 2022 regular season MVP, Booker)

• Lakers (LeBron)

• Sixers (Embiid)

• Bucks (Giannis)

• Any team that has an MVP this season if they’re not part of the list already (there’s been a rise in “Tatum is the best player on the best team opinions”, but Suns fans went through this with Booker in 2022 when they were laps ahead of the league and he was their best player. It won’t happen. But Shai Gilgeous-Alexander has a legitimate shot.)

For those who are doubtful about this, that’s fine. It feels like the Celtics have been knocking on the door for years (5 conference finals, including 1 finals trip, in 7 years), and got better by a non-trivial amount since last season. Ironically, the last team to do something like this without an MVP… the 2003-2008 Pistons (6 ECF’s with 2 finals trips in 6 seasons). I have more reasons!

2. Their offensive style doesn’t have precedent for playoff success

The other night, I was talking to a friend and the NBA came up, and she mentioned how much she had enjoyed watching Stockton in Malone in the 90’s, but that there were too many 3’s in the NBA today. She also commented that it had become more prevalent on the high school and college level. I considered doing my best JJ Redick impression, and mocking the post-up era of yester-years. But then I remembered how even I have stretches of games where I feel tired of it as well, where it’s just pull-up transition 3 after pull-up transition 3, and there doesn’t feel like there’s any strategy beyond the Law of Large Numbers.

A Kobe Bryant interview clip has been making the rounds, talking about how these days, players play “accidental basketball” (basically, teams aren’t looking to expose opponents as much through strategy, but want to win more of the numbers game). This feels true, partially because in 2021, Coach Mike Budeholzer told his team, on camera, to “play random” (which was mocked at the time, but it is a pretty common thing to say these days for a lot of coaches). I think that the Mazzula Celtics are great examples of this type of basketball, along with two (very good) teams of the past: the D’Antoni Rockets (2017-2020) and the last couple years of the Quin Snyder Utah Jazz (2021 and 2022).

For some reason, Trevor Ariza is the first player I think of after Harden and CP3 on those teams.

Since the 2016-17 season, these are the teams who have attempted more than 46% of their shots from 3, along with their % of field goal attempts which were 3 pointers:

• 2016-17 Rockets: 46.7%

• 2017-18 Rockets: 50.2%

• 2018-19 Rockets: 51.9%

• 2019-20 Rockets: 50.1%

• 2020-21 Jazz: 48.8%

• 2021-22 Jazz: 46.8%

• 2022-23 Mavericks: 48.7%

• 2022-23 Celtics: 48.0%

• 2022-23 Warriors: 47.9%

• 2023-24 Celtics: 47.0%

Quick note: isn’t it funny how people blame Stephen Wardell Curry and Steve Kerr for making 3-point shooting too common, when they aren’t even on this list? It feels like it was D’Antoni and Daryl Morey who did this, with their analytics.

Famously, the 2017-18 and 2018-19 Rockets sputtered and the 2020-21 and 2021-22 Jazz were off-key when the lights got brightest. Two games are especially painful: the Rockets Game 7 crash versus the Warriors in the Western Conference Finals in 2018, and the Jazz in both games 5 and 6 of the 2021 Western Conference semi-finals versus the Clippers. These teams were in control of the game, and their offenses just stopped working for an extensive period of time. I think that the Heat/Celtics ECF last year is a good example of this same thing. The Celtics, the #2 seed, were outscored by Miami, the #8 seed, by 16 points in the second half of Game 1, then 14 points in the 4th quarter of Game 2. After getting blown out in Game 3 in Miami, it was practically impossible to win the series.

“Dallin, that’s just bad luck. More small sample size theater!” Well, my friend, that’s what the playoffs are—small sample sizes. The Law of Large Numbers says that your average of the sample will approach the true value as your sample size approaches infinity. You know what the sample size is of a playoff series? 7 games. You don’t get to wait 3 games to start going on a run, because the margin for error shrinks with every loss in a series (maximum of 4). Not too close to infinity!

I think that this is why most MVP types (reason #1) are so necessary for playoff success. Many of them can flip the possession-optimizing switch that NBA teams have deprioritized in the regular season. Not everyone even does it the same! The Warriors and the Nuggets have done it with cuts, 2-man games, and inverted PnR’s, and the LeBron’s and the Kawhi’s have done it with a “try to stop our cyborg” strategy. But you must be able to optimize every possession when it matters most, and I think that these D’Antoni/Snyder/Mazzula offenses hadn’t/haven’t shown aptitude in at doing that.

But maybe the Celtics do have that switch, and I am just a hater. Time will tell.

Can we even tell?

A final consideration, but not necessarily a doubt, is that the regular season has become more different than ever from the playoffs. I am curious how this impacts the Celtics, or doesn’t, along with other teams this year.

Similar to offense, I think that teams play defense in a more Law of Large Numbers way during the regular season as well. They choose a scheme that will maximize their total wins, then say “we will strategize come playoff time”. So, maybe none of these stats matter!

So, who do I think will win the East? Clearly, it’s the Jalen Suggs-led Orlando Magic.