The Celtics got what they wanted, and needed, by eliminating the Miami Heat

This was how it had to be. 

“I was thinking when the play-in game was—you know, they were trying to figure out the standings in the last week or so, I just had it in my mind made up that we was going to play Miami,” Jayson Tatum said after his Celtics exorcised the demons of playoffs past and beat the Heat in Game 5. 

Okay, maybe that's a little dramatic, but the point stands. Boston wanted to play Miami. Maybe they needed to play Miami. And even though Jimmy Butler, Terry Rozier, and Josh Richardson were all missing, it didn’t really matter. Winning this series, against this team, and doing it this way was had a little extra juice. 

“I think it’s like my fourth time in five years playing them in the playoffs,” Tatum said. “I wanted to play Miami in the sense that maybe last year playing against Atlanta we might have relaxed a little bit. But knowing the history with Miami and how hard they play, how well-coached they are, that for a first-round matchup, regardless of the seed, we were going to have to be ready to play and be ready to fight.”

The Celtics were, indeed, ready. Aside from a Game 2 where everything went right for Miami and Boston suffered the consequences of a less-than-stellar approach, Boston was exactly what we wanted. My two words for this series were “methodical” and “ruthless,” and I’d say the Celtics were both for a vast majority of these five games. 

Joe Mazzulla loves to talk about how little some of these ancillary things matter to winning basketball games. What he’s trying to do is strip away all the extra layers of crap everyone piles onto themselves so his players keep the game as simple as possible. 

But that's tough to do when the opponent is Miami. The Celtics cartoonishly shot themselves in the foot against the Heat last year, and the way they lost that series still lingers. That kind of stuff is hard to shake.

“Last year, I probably had one of my worst series in the playoffs just in general and that has just carried on from there,” Jaylen Brown said. “Facing them in the first round this year, I still feel like I could have played a lot better and a lot more relaxed. Maybe put a little bit more attention on myself than I needed to. But still came out and was able to find ways to be aggressive and help my team win.”

The impressive thing about this series isn’t that they won it in five games. It’s that they won it so easily when it’s clear there were extra layers to it that could have derailed them. Tatum admitted to wanting this matchup. Brown admitted he put more on himself than he needed to. Both of those admissions could have led to both stars straying so far from the game plan that the rest of the Celtics were just bystanders. 

And isn’t that what essentially happened in Game 2? Faced with Miami’s relentless shooting, Tatum and Brown went into “we’ll handle this” mode and it cost the Celtics. Those are two great players but when they play like they're the only great players, they can get too tunnel-visioned and fall into the traps Miami has lying all over the floor. 

"They do a little bit of everything. Physically, mentally, they try to mess with you, make you hesitate, make you think. They're good at that,” Brown said. “They put (Tyler) Herro on me, they tried to double at the rim late. They make you want to hesitate and play a little zone. They do a little bit of everything. So it's a combination of physically and mentally just graduating, and I feel like we executed down the stretch and now we're advancing to the next round."

The mental graduation, which Brown later clarified isn’t the final step but more of a mid-term type of thing, showed itself in the final three games of this series. The Celtics had a moment of being their old selves and recovered. They remembered who they were and why they were successful and got back to that. Unsurprisingly, the floor opened back up again, giving others a chance to flourish and for the Celtics to be the Celtics again. 

“I don’t really worry about what happened last year,” Mazzulla said. “At the end of the day, I liked how we approached the series regardless of who we were playing. Had an intentionality to it, had an attention to detail and had a consistent physicality, and that’s the most important thing is having that regardless of who you are playing against, and wake up tomorrow, you have to do it all over again vs. another team. So it doesn’t really matter what happened then.”

Except sometimes it does. And that Boston put that aside, especially after a brief tumble off the wagon, is really what makes what Mazzulla said matter most. They shouldn’t ignore what happened before. They should embrace it. And if you can embrace that and then dominate the way Boston did, then you know you’re getting somewhere.

“We should be learning from our mistakes and learning from things that we could have done better and applying it to the next season,” Tatum said. “Which we are doing this year, because we are trying to have a different outcome than we've had in the past.”