It’s just one game, I whisper to myself, as Shai Gilgeous-Alexander launches a three with lofty clearance over Jrue Holiday.
It’s just one game, I say, shaking my head as if to clear it when Isaiah Joe on a fastbreak flings the ball around Sam Hauser in hot pursuit, giving Hauser a ring of Saturn in basketball form for a split second, to Aaron Wiggins, shadowing them, for a tidy pop-up shot.
It’s just one game, I say, voice rising, when Gilgeous-Alexander pins the ball, barely out of Tatum’s hand, against the backboard for a block and then, immediately at the other end, lobs it to Isaiah Hartenstein for a dunk.
Sunday’s match between the Thunder and Celtics was just one game, and it’s only just January, but the contest showed what could very believably be a Finals preview. It also showed how OKC can aim to beat Boston in a series.
The Celtics are a machine, and like a machine, they are mechanical. Their dominance comes through the intuitive, expert understanding of what they are good at and how to deploy it, and what they are good at is launching threes. In Sunday’s game, the Celtics took 46 3-pointers. While they only made nine of them (for comparison, the Thunder were 16-of-38 from three), Boston is still shooting the most from deep in the league — sometimes as any as 20 more than their opponents over the course of a game.
The teams that are seeing success in recent wins over the Celtics aren’t necessarily attempting to limit Boston’s three-point attempts. With so many players capable of shooting the three ball it’s a futile effort and expends a lot of wasted energy. What they are doing, and what the Thunder did, is find ways to momentarily jam the machines.
The Thunder moved the ball more, they pressured Boston in the midrange and under the basket, they looked for any gap in the machine’s cogs they could wedge themselves into. Boston used to be way more susceptible to flustering, they abhorred a team that played a messy, gritty, or in any way abrasive style. It’s why the Heat have been so good at beating them in the postseason, because those Miami teams stopped at nothing to make things miserable and didn’t mind playing knee deep in the muck.
To slow the Celtics down this way is tough, and to do it over the course of a playoff series still feels close to impossible, but beating the Celtics at all a year ago, even earlier this season, once felt the same way.
OKC isn’t a messy team. They smother, but they communicate; they switch, but they’re organized. Gilgeous-Alexander has one of the most herky-jerky handles in the league but there’s a hypnotic rhythm to it, and he deploys it like a cobra. The Thunder have formalized the elements that get under the Celtics’ skin, none of what they threw at Boston on Sunday was a fluke.
Of course with Boston’s barrage of 3-point shooting, and should they be having a particularly hot night despite what wrenches the Thunder slip them, all those tactics could still be for naught. Still, in a series sometimes just one game is all it takes, and from that one win on Sunday, you can bet the Thunder found plenty of buttons to push.
