How the Boston Celtics Defeated the Sports Punditry Complex

The growth mentality of the 2023-24 Boston Celtics.

Photo by Matthew Moloney on Unsplash

Last night the Boston Celtics defeated the Dallas Mavericks 106-88, winning the NBA Finals in a gentlemen’s sweep of five games in which they held the Mavs under 100 points in each victory.

As a Celtics fan this obviously makes me very happy. But I confess that this particular run of Celtics dominance has also pleased the social scientist in me. In the face of pretty overwhelming analytics that showed just how good this team was, a lot of pundits said a lot of silly things and now have to explain away their silliness.

I have been a lifelong fan of the Boston Celtics. As a child, this meant savoring their Larry-Bird-era championships during a time when Boston’s other sports franchises were either scuffling or, um, let’s say “not living up to their potential.” As an adult, the experience has been different since their last championship win in 2008. Since then the Celtics have gone deep into the playoffs for what feels like much of the last decade, only to fall short in the Eastern conference championship or, most notably, in the 2022 NBA Finals against the Golden State Warriors.

These recent Celtics teams have been led by All-Stars Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown, and truth be told their teams overachieved by getting to the Finals against the Warriors and so many conference championships against LeBron James-led teams. Last season, however, they were favored against the Miami Heat in the Eastern Conference championship, fell behind 0-3, fought their way back to 3-3 only to play a stinker of a Game 7 to lose that series.

During the off-season, Celtics GM Brad Stevens acted with urgency, making two trades that meant parting ways with the beloved Marcus Smart and the adored “Time Lord” Robert Williams in return for Kristaps Porzingis and Jrue Holiday. The result was that by every conceivable metric, the Celtics were the best team in the NBA this year. They were the only 60-game winner. Their offense and their defense were top two at the end of the season, leading to a historic net rating in which they scored, on average, more than ten points than their opponents. According to The Ringer’s Zach Kram, “From opening night through the last buzzer of the Finals, Boston outscored its opponents by 1,083 total points—the fourth-highest raw point differential in NBA history, one spot behind the best Durant-era Warriors squad.”

As the Wall Street Journal’s Robert O’Connell noted, what made the Celtics so scary was that the top eight players in their rotation were all legitimate three-point threats who had to be guarded out in the perimeter, which opened up a lot of space near the basket for drives and cuts. Oh, and they all played defense as well. I was fortunate enough to go to two Celtics games at the TD Garden, games in which they annihilated the Toronto Raptors and Golden State Warriors, and if anything they looked better in person than on television.

Were these Celtics perfect? No, because no team is perfect. This Boston team relied heavily on three-pointers, and if they hit a shooting slump it was possible for opposing teams to come back. There seemed to be a significant number of games where the Celtics would romp to a 20-point lead and then see it shrink quickly in the fourth quarter. To be clear, the Celtics still won most of those games, but those opponent comebacks were hard to ignore.

This might explain the sports punditry cognitive dissonance as the NBA playoffs began. The analytics suggested that the Celtics were a historically great team. Commentators, however, were way more skeptical, predicting them to fall to whichever team won the Western Conference.

Why? As ESPN’s Scott Van Pelt asked after last night’s clincher, “All told, the Boston Celtics won 80 games in the regular season and the playoffs. This is who they were from October forward. Never lost more than three games in a row. They led half their games by at least twenty points. Which makes you wonder why anyone wondered about them.”

Perhaps the predictions were informed by previous Boston failures. But I think the New Yorker’s Louisa Thomas got at the key misperception in a column earlier this month: the Celtics do not look like a traditional NBA champion:

Every member of the team’s starting five can not only sink the ball from deep but score at the rim. They can also pass and defend well—it is hard to imagine a more balanced team. The players talk about an ethic of sacrifice; the guard Jrue Holiday, acquired from the Milwaukee Bucks, took just ten shots a game during the regular season, compared with fifteen last year. (Tatum and Brown are also taking fewer shots.) Everyone does everything. This is apparently not in keeping with conventional notions of basketball greatness. The N.B.A. title is often won by the league’s best player, and winning is often credited to that player’s determination and killer instinct, particularly late in games. Jayson Tatum is maybe only (only!) the league’s sixth-best player, and Boston is typically at its best when he’s helping to orchestrate the team’s balanced attack, rather than taking over at the end of close games. His demeanor, deliberate and steady, tends to reflect that rational approach.

And so, every time the Celtics have wasted a big lead—and even sometimes when they have won with clinical precision—commentators have debated the team’s character. The coaches and players, meanwhile, have mostly shrugged, talking in even tones about resilience, and learning from mistakes. They finished the regular season with the best record in the league, fourteen games ahead of the Knicks, the second seed in the East. (The same gap separated the Knicks from the tenth-ranked team.) The general response was more admiration than awe….

Many great teams talk, dubiously, about being underestimated. No one is underestimating these Celtics, but it’s hard to deny the sense that they’re not appreciated.

When the Finals against the Dallas Mavericks rolled around, the Sports Punditry Complex had more than a week to dissect the matchup and the takes, oh lordy, the takes. The A majority of ESPN’s basketball commentators predicted the Mavs would win. Others went so far as to predict the Mavs would complete a gentleman’s sweep! Their logic was traditional sports narrative stuff:

• The Celtics had a historically easy path to the Finals, with injuries to key players on the Miami Heat, Cleveland Cavaliers, and Indiana Pacers, while the Mavs were “battle-tested” in working their way through a tougher Western Conference.

• In Luka Dončić, the Mavs had the best player on the court, and maybe the second-best player in Kyrie Irving. The NBA team with the best player wins.

• The Mavericks had all the momentum after a couple of nifty deadline deals, with offensive firepower and a newly-vigilant defense. Meanwhile, the Celtics had all those past failures hanging like an albatross on their back.

And, in the end, none of that mattered a whit.¹ The Celtics’ offense might have been hit-or-miss during the playoffs as their three-point shooting waxed and waned, but their defense throughout the Finals was rock-solid. The Celtics were the better, more focused team, and when their shots were sinking, the gap between them and the Mavericks was massive. All throughout the season the Celtics embraced Joe Mazzulla’s philosophy of focusing on the journey as much as the result. The team possessed a growth mindset — as Brad Stevens put it, “In a growth mindset, you are focused every day by your growth, not deterred by challenges and not overwhelmed by accomplishments—you’re just moving on to the next day.”

Dončić might have been the best player on the court, but Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown were the most dynamic, resilient duo on the court. Even when their shots were not falling, they were defending, rebounding, and making crisp passes to their teammates. Dončić was great at times but still needs to mature — which was why he kept fading in the fourth quarter of the Finals. It was beautiful to watch Tatum and Brown outwork their opponents.

Sports commentators tried to suggest that the Celtics would falter in Game Three, when Porzingis was ruled out and the series switched to Dallas. That didn’t happen. After Dallas blew out the Celtics in Game 4, pundits harkened back to past Celtics failures and suggested that maybe the Mavs could come back. That didn’t happen either. When Jayson Tatum was interviewed after the Game 5 victory, he said, “we’ve responded all year.”

As a Boston Celtics fan, I’m happy that Tatum has proven his doubters wrong. And as a social scientist, I am so happy that after so many sports pundits ignored the analytics and the evidence, they proved once and for all that I can ignore Stephen A. Smith for the rest of my days.

After the victory, Tatum asked, “what they gonna say now?” The answer is, “no one will care.” Because “they” proved to be wrong.

1. The “easy path” logic was a particularly weak reed, given that they dispatched perennial playoff overachievers Miami as well as the Pacers, who had the best offense in the NBA this year. They did most of this without Kristaps Porzingis on the court.