Boston built for the long haul

It is an old adage in auto racing that weight is the enemy.

But it isn’t always.

In 1966, a group of Ford GT40s which were around six hundred pounds heavier than the Ferraris they were running against spent twenty-four hours at Le Mans burying Enzo Ferrari’s entries. The race, which is dramatized, and in fact, over-dramatized in Ford v. Ferrari, was a testament not just to the drivers of the vehicles but also the engineers that designed them.

The engines, derived from stock motors available in most Ford cars at the time, were put on testing rigs a month before the race, and set to run on a program based on a “perfect lap” of the track performed by Ken Miles and recorded electronically. The engines being tested were expected to run non-stop for 48 hours, twice the length of the Le Mans race. As engines broke, the parts that failed were upgraded until Ford had an engine configuration that would reliably run at race speeds, for twice as long as the race.

This hefty vehicle was extremely hard on brakes. In race configuration, the brakes had to burn off over 17 million joules of energy per lap. By contrast, stopping a 4,300 pound car from 70 miles per hour burns off only about 900,000 joules. Imagine doing that once every 11 seconds for 24 hours straight! No brake disc alloy of that era could withstand such loads over a full day of racing, so Ford engineers designed a system in which the entire brake assembly could be replaced during a routine pit stop.

When the checkered flag fell, the race, which was then one of massive attrition, saw only 15 finishers of 55 on the starting grid, and the first three were Fords. The Ferrari 330s that were their primary competitors were both gone by hour 17, seven hours and 134 laps before the end of the race.

Those GT40s were built to last, not to save weight. Ford engineers put into practice the reality that the winner of Le Mans isn’t the fastest car, it’s the fastest car that finishes.

The Celtics have been assembled with similar precision.

Photo by Chris Marion/NBAE via Getty Images

The East has been riddled with injuries this season. Part of that is likely statistical variance, and part of it is because even if players aren’t getting injured more often these days (debatable), recovery times are now, sensibly, longer than they used to be. Moreover, we can’t discount the possibility that at least part of it is the pace that the Celtics set during the regular season.

In the same way that an embarrassing performance at Le Mans in 1965 led Ford to overhaul every aspect of their program in order to make a victory in ‘66 as certain as possible, the Celtics roster was overhauled last summer, after an embarrassing loss to Miami in the ECF.

Somehow, Brad Stevens managed to turn Marcus Smart—a very good player in his own right—into a deeply discounted Kristaps Porzingis, a move that should’ve earned him the EOY award all on its own, notwithstanding the subsequent move that turned Rob Williams and Malcolm Brogdon into Jrue Holiday.

The result? A team that has been engineered for endurance.

The NBA season is ridiculously long. The league exists because a group of NHL and arena owners, led by Boston’s own Walter Brown, wanted to fill more winter dates on their calendar. The result? A season that is designed to maximize revenue, even as terms like “scheduled loss” and “load management” have become part of our vocabulary.

Granted, there is a measure of luck involved in any successful season. But, as Branch Rickey once said, “Luck is the residue of design.”

The Celtics not only won 64 games this season, they did so without losing more than three games in a row at any point. In fact, the C’s never even lost four of five. Their worst five- and ten-game records were 3-2 and 6-4 respectively. At their worst, the C’s were still a 49-win team. An entire season of the C’s playing their worst would have put them in contention for the number two seed.

And it’s fair to point out that two of those three 6-4 stretches came in the final days of the season, when their playoff position was signed, sealed and delivered. By contrast, the last 64-win team, Phoenix in ‘21-22, had eight stretches where they went 6-4, and seven stretches where their five-game record was 2-3.

The C’s accomplished this while routinely resting Kristaps Porzingis on back-to-backs, and doing other forms of load management. Boston also kept Horford’s mileage down, and even acquired Xavier Tillman, Jr., at the trade deadline. With Horford’s age and KP’s injury history, the bigs were always going to be the brakes on this team, and Boston proactively took steps to make sure they could be switched out in a hurry. Other teams didn’t necessarily see things this way, or didn’t have the flexibility to read and react. The Sixers, Knicks and Heat all burned out well short of the finish line because they didn’t have the depth they needed.

Now, time will tell whether the C’s can keep this scheme working, paying the inevitable tax bills and replacing players that leave or retire, but for the moment, the C’s have absolutely captured lightning in a bottle.

Photo by Barry Chin/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

This is a team built for how the NBA is now, a league in which training has both brought players closer to injury while extending the recovery periods from the old ‘rub some dirt on it’ days. A successful regular season team needs, these days, to be either extremely lucky or extremely well built, or both.

The ‘put three superstars on a team with a bunch of role players’ era is, I think we can safely say, over. There are too many good teams to think that you can sandbag the regular season, mostly saving your stars for the playoffs, take a so-so seed, and then win a title. The middle of the NBA pack has gotten too good for any right-minded team to want three rounds against teams prepared to slug it out before playing for a title.

The Indiana Pacers are a classic example of this. They outmatched the Knicks in a grueling 7-game series and dang near stole the first game of their series with Boston, which tipped off barely two days after they beat the Knicks. And despite being down 0-2 to the Celtics, they have not been an easy out.

But make no mistake, the C’s pushed other teams in the East that had visions of contending. The Bucks’ former head coach Adrian Griffin was rudely and unjustifiably dumped midseason because they couldn’t keep up with Boston, or perhaps, they felt that they were better than Boston and that, rather than doing the best possible with the roster he had, Griffin was underachieving. The subsequent hiring of Doc Rivers and its aftermath, I believe, safely answers that question.

So as the season unfolded, there was Boston, resting players and still winning games at a pretty steady 80% clip, while every other team in the East that saw themselves as contenders had to press in an effort to keep pace, hoping for a Boston slump that, as the season wore on, became increasingly improbable. When Giannis Antetokounmpo came up lame against Boston in the 79th game of the season, he was playing because the Bucks were still fighting for a seed, and they needed that win.

And the Celtics are no strangers to injuries derailing a playoff run.

You can go back to the ‘80s, if you want, and look at the way Larry Bird’s body gave out on him. More recently, Kevin Garnett’s injury in ‘09, and the sudden loss of Kendrick Perkins in ‘10 killed title aspirations in consecutive seasons.

Heck, the loss of Jeff Green to an undiscovered heart defect, and Avery Bradley to a shoulder injury left the C’s bench critically short on scoring ability when they faced the Heat in game seven of the 2012 ECF, a game in which the C’s bench contributed only two points.

The result of over a decade of experience with significant injuries, especially those coming late in the season or the playoffs, is the idea that, perhaps, the modern NBA team has to be constructed not only with a ‘next man up’ mindset, but also with enough depth of talent that the ‘next man up’ isn’t a massive drop off from the guy he’s replacing. Instead of looking at injuries as freak occurrences, teams may have to start assuming that injuries, even to key players are almost inevitable.

Photo by David Dow/NBAE via Getty Images

Maybe this means that the championship team in this era has to manufacture injury luck by relying less on any one player than has been the practice in the past. If you lose your best player, you need to be good enough to hold on until he comes back. Maybe you also need to be good enough that players don’t have the weight of the world, or at least, a playoff seed on their backs all March and April long.

Ford’s approach to winning at Le Mans in 1966 changed the way everyone prepared for the race. More than that, it changed the way engineers thought about the race and the cars they built for it.

And, depending on how the next few weeks play out, Boston may once again be changing the way teams are built. The NBA’s middle class is as good as it has been in years in part because these teams are generally better at replacing talent lost to injury. The Cavs were arguably a tougher opponent for Boston without Donovan Mitchell. This greater resilience to injury is possibly because their best players tend to stuff stats at the expense of good team play, or maybe it’s because they’ve got a lot of young talent coming up, but one way or another, a lot of these middle class teams can be pretty intimidating.

However, there’s no indication that the GMs and front offices of these teams realize why they’re good, or what they need to do to get better.

Boston, on the other hand, was engineered to win.