What the Media Refuses to Admit About the Celtics

The Boston Celtics are officially NBA champions again, and believe it or not, this team is probably even better than you think. This video is sponsored by Squarespace, but a little bit more about them later. While a lot of people want to spend time talking about how much injury luck played a role in Boston's path to the finals, or about how the Mavericks were the easiest possible matchup for them, I think it's worth talking about just how good this team actually is, and looking at how they built a historically great team in an era where it's as difficult as ever to build such a dominant team. Typically, a big indicator of a team being a true contender is having a top 10 offense and top 10 defense. If you go back and look at the champions of the last 20 years, that's something that generally has held true in the vast majority of seasons. Not only did the Celtics meet that criteria, but they ranked number 1 in offense and number 2 in defense. They also clocked an 11.7 net rating during the regular season, which was over 4 points above the number 2 net rating OKC Thunder. This Boston team wasn't just really good, no team was really even close to them. So now we sit here looking at this championship, and there's some disappointment about the finals not being more competitive, which I completely understand, I wish it would have been a better series. But also, nobody should really be that surprised that the Celtics made quick work of this series. They've been this good all season. It just so happens that the Mavericks were the ones that had to try and stop them, which certainly wasn't the best matchup. There are other teams in the West that I think would have matched up better against the Celtics, but that shouldn't take away from how good this Celtics team is. There's a lot of talk about this team being a super team, but this isn't some quote unquote super team that was built around amassing as many stars as they possibly could. They drafted their two main pieces, with Jalen Brown and Jason Tatum being the core focal points of this franchise for almost a decade now. While Boston has always been one of the most aggressive teams in the NBA when it comes to trying to fill out the roster via trades, it was normally for the Al Horford's and Derrick White's of the world, instead of always trying to go out there and get the biggest names available. Even their two big splashes that they made last offseason were for two players that had relatively damaged reputations with Drew Holliday and Porzingis. Drew Holliday was coming off that disappointing first round exit with the Milwaukee Bucks, where they were eliminated by the eighth seeded Heat, due in part to Drew Holliday having one of the worst shooting performances of his career over the course of that series. Getting Drew Holliday was, of course, going to be an upgrade for the Celtics just by the simple nature of his defense and the benefits that you get from having another ball handler that can help facilitate your offense. But if we rewind a little bit, there were some very mixed reactions to this trade. Would Drew Holliday be able to hit big shots during the postseason? Would he get tunnel vision like he would occasionally do with Milwaukee at some of the worst times? The biggest difference with Drew Holliday now compared to how he was operating with Milwaukee is that Drew is maybe the fourth or fifth option for Boston on any given night, considering he's playing alongside Tatum, Brown, Porzingis, and Derrick White in the starting lineup. Milwaukee needed him to be a scorer. Boston doesn't. They simply needed him to be that lockdown perimeter defender and to operate as a connective piece in their offense, and he did that exceptionally well. We even saw him operating in the pick and roll as the roll man, and his short roll playmaking was one of the most valuable parts of Boston's offense throughout the playoffs. Not to mention his efficiency from the perimeter was a massive step up from his entire career. Throughout his career in the playoffs, Drew Holliday is a 34.4% three-point shooter, which is pretty underwhelming, but over the course of the 2024 playoffs, Drew shot 40.5% from beyond the arc. His true shooting percentage in the playoffs of 62.3% this year is the highest efficiency of his career. Yes, in the process of getting Drew Holliday, the Celtics lost Marcus Smart, but it's really hard to say that whatever they lost by trading away Smart wasn't immediately made up for by what they got from Holliday on both the offensive and defensive ends. And even though it's not his responsibility to be one of the primary scoring options, he's still capable of scoring on his own with the ball in his hands. When he was with Milwaukee, defenses had to focus on Giannis Middleton and Drew, and for the most part, that's it. But with Boston, Drew was able to play so much more freely and operate with so much more spacing because defenses had to worry about Tatum, Brown, White, and Porzingis as well as Drew. So even when he did end up in late shot clock positions where the ball was in his hands and he needed to cause play as a scorer, that was no problem because defenses weren't able to load up on him by default. Real quick guys, I want to take a second to tell you about the sponsor of today's video, Squarespace. Squarespace is the all-in-one website platform for creators to set apart from the crowd online. Whether you're trying to share your work with more people or grow a brand, Squarespace makes it super simple to create an awesome website where you can engage with your audience and reach more people. I have absolutely zero web design experience, but Squarespace's simple and easy to use user interface takes out all of the frustration of building a website and turns it into an easy and fun process. You can make a completely personalized website with their guided design system, Squarespace Blueprint. 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I was in the camp of folks that thought Kristaps Porzingis had become criminally underrated over the course of last season. A quick glance of the numbers made it overwhelmingly clear that he was still an extremely productive player despite being on a bad team. Prior to his arrival in Boston, he was still putting up 23.2 points, 8.4 rebounds, 2.7 assists, and 1.9 blocks per game while being a 38.5% shooter from three and one of the very best post-up big men in the entire NBA. Plus, during his last season in Washington, he managed to play 65 games, which made it his healthiest season since 2017. Really the biggest criticism that anybody had of the trade was the fact that Porzingis was highly injury prone, which is fair, but also even with him dealing with injuries throughout the post-season and regular season, it still just didn't matter. So when you run into the conversation of this Celtics team and whether or not they're a super team, you gotta look at the sentiment that the majority of people had when this team was assembled into this iteration that we currently know. A fair amount of people were completely ready to give up on Drew after that disappointing playoff exit with Milwaukee, and Porzingis was viewed as this glass cannon. But then you look a little bit closer and see that Porzingis only played in seven of Boston's 19 playoff games this run. And outside of Drew Holiday, this is largely the same Boston team that we've been watching for years now outside of Derek White. Porzingis certainly helped get them to where they needed to be, securing the number one seed, helping them win in the first round, setting the tone in game one of the finals. But I think that the Celtics have proved on multiple occasions, both during the regular season and in the playoffs, that this is an insanely good team with or without Porzingis. Not to mention the fact that over the course of nearly half a decade, there's been all sorts of chatter from around the NBA and NBA media that the Celtics need to give up on one of the two Jays and commit to building around one. People even thought that Boston shouldn't give Jalen Brown the Supermax. Even I looked at the price tag that they were going to have to put up on the contract to keep him. And I understood the reluctance that some people had about it. But you've got to understand one thing. If you win a championship, it's worth it. And that's the big lesson to be learned here from this Celtics team. In today's NBA, teams will have a core group of players. They'll try to make a deep run in the playoffs three or four times. And if it doesn't work and they don't win a championship in any of those three or four attempts, then it seems like a lot of teams just blow it up and go into a rebuild until they find their next core group of players to try and make a run with. That's not what this Celtics team did. They banged their head against the wall for seven playoff runs around Tatum and Brown, trying to break through and finally win a championship. They didn't blow it up. They didn't sell out to try and get the biggest names available. They made smart moves around the edges whenever it made sense to do so without sacrificing their identity. And they were persistent for years, even when the media was parading around about how they needed to blow it up and that they could never make it work with the core pieces that they had. For years now, they've been competitive, frequently having some of the best net ratings in the NBA. And then this year, they finally put it all together and skyrocketed into a well-oiled machine. If you're familiar with the story of Sisyphus, he's a figure in Greek mythology whose punishment in the afterlife was to push a boulder up a hill endlessly for all eternity, never reaching the top. The Celtics are a lot like Sisyphus. They didn't give up on pushing the boulder up the hill when they didn't get to the top after the first few tries. They continued to labor year after year, despite setback after setback and seemingly failure after failure. But all you need is to make it happen once. You just need the stars to align once. And the Celtics did everything to put themselves in position for success when those stars aligned. If they had given up and let that boulder roll back down the hill, then they wouldn't be hoisting the championship trophy now. Really hope you guys enjoyed this video. If you did, I'd appreciate it a ton if you left a like and subscribe. That seriously helps me out so much. Regardless, thank you guys so much for watching, and I'll see you in the next one.