Tuesday 6/18/24
Got loud here last night! That makes it sound like I was whooping it up in the streets. I wasn't. But others were after the Celtics won the NBA title. Helicopters were overhead until like one in the morning. People laying on their horns. Drunken meatheads screaming. You wonder how people get up and go to work.
Celtics pretty much came out and blew the doors off. Tatum was really good, Brown was solid, key defenders Holiday and White did their things, Porzingas checked in and gave the team and the crowd a shot of energy--not that they lacked for any--and Horford finally got his playoff reward. The dagger was the half court buzzer beater as the second quarter expired. If you didn't know already, you knew then.
I was really happy for the players and Brad Stevens. He has gotten lost in some of this, but he's been here a while, you thought he wasn't long for the city, perhaps, after he moved into the front office, but he stuck at it, brought in the right guys, moved on from a guy they needed to move on from, and there's title number eighteen.
Really admire Jrue Holiday, who was perhaps the most important piece of this title-winning puzzle. He had won, he know how to win, and he came in and said, "Whatever you need from me is what I want to do." What a great attitude. It wasn't about personal numbers with him or how many shots he took. This probably wouldn't have happened without him. He was everything you could have hoped for.
It sounds greedy to say that it'd been a while since a Boston team won a championship, with the "drought" going back to 2018, but yeah, wow, really cool. I remember coming in from my hikes in the woods as a kid and the Celtics would be on the TV and they'd inbound the ball under their basket and sometimes it seemed like no one even dribbled it, there'd just be this series of passes--some crisp and on a line, others on an arc with the perfect angle of descent--and then McHale or Parish would lay the ball in at the other end and I'd think, "That was beautiful," which was what I thought last night in a different way.
Brown got his Finals MVP and he didn't have amazing stats. No one did. All of these years and they couldn't quite figure out how to play team ball, to limit the isolation stuff, to max out on being members of a team not max out on being individuals. This spring they were a team and this is how it paid off. It's always better to play as a team. It's more fun and it's more rewarding. In everything.
I was also happy for Mike Gorman, who put in an appearance in the pregame show, that his last year with the team was a championship year, the perfect capper for him.
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