Last May, after one of the worst losses of his basketball career, Jaylen Brown sat at the podium in disappointment.
“We failed. I failed. We let the whole city down,” Brown said minutes after the Celtics fell to the Heat in Game 7 of the Eastern Conference Finals.
In that season-ending loss, Brown struggled mightily, finishing the night with a career-high 8 turnovers, and shooting just 8-23 from the field.
Now, eleven months later, Brown and the Celtics get a chance at revenge. Tomorrow at 1pm, the Celtics and Heat will face off once again — their fourth postseason match-up in five years. In the 2021 bubble, the Heat emerged victorious after six games, while in 2022, the Celtics came out on top in a tight Game 7 en route to a Finals appearance.
Last spring, after Derrick White’s Game 6 buzzer-beater, it looked like the Celtics could become the first NBA team to ever come back and win a series after trailing 0-3. Then, Jayson Tatum sprained his ankle a minute into Game 7, Rob Williams battled illness, and the rest of the team couldn’t find any rhythm. The Celtics got blown out, 103-84, in front of a devastated crowd that had to watch an opposing team hoist a trophy on the TD Garden floor for the second consecutive season.
While redemption is certainly on the Celtics’ minds, both Jaylen Brown and Joe Mazzulla told reporters at practice on Saturday that they’re looking to leave last year in the past.
“You don’t forget, but you do your best to live in the moment,” Brown said. “You learn from those experiences, and you can’t bring those thoughts into it. You got a new team, you got new players — I’m a new player. So, just, you come and you stay in the moment, and you take it one day at a time.”
The Celtics and the Heat have had substantially different seasons to date. The Celtics boasted a league-best 64-18 record, while Miami was one play-in loss away from missing the postseason altogether after finishing the year 46-36. Still, Mazzulla stressed that the team’s respective records were irrelevant, as were the outcomes of previous playoff matchups.
“Right now, everyone is 0-0,” Mazzulla said. “In my mind, the seeding doesn’t matter. The regular season doesn’t matter. What matters is just how we approach [things]. It started with how we practiced this week – all we can control is the time that we have. The guys have done a great job just honing in on all the details, the execution, on both sides of the ball. But, both teams are 0-0.”
Heading into the first round of the playoffs, Joe Mazzulla said he likes the identity the Celtics have established this year – one rooted in open-mindedness and flexibility – because he knows that as much as tactical plans can be made in advance, it’s hard to predict what adjustments this match-up will require.
“What matters is focusing on the present – who we are as a team, what we’ve worked on,” Mazzulla said. “Every series, every playoff, every team, season, takes on a life of its own, an identity of its own. We spent the year establishing that identity, and I think it’s important to continue that through the playoffs, knowing that every series is going to be a little bit different.”
The Celtics have had a massive lead in the standings all season. They’ve been ready for postseason play to begin for weeks now. But that doesn’t mean anything in this playoff run will come easy.
“They’re ready. But that doesn’t mean that things are going to go our way,” Mazzulla said. “They’ve been ready all week. They’ve been ready all year. It doesn’t mean we’re going to get off to a good start, it doesn’t mean we’re not going to get off to a good start.”
Mazzulla noted it’s important that the Celtics enter the postseason with confidence, but also with the understanding that they’re not invincible.
“Balance is the most important thing — understanding that we are a really, really good team, but [having] the humility to know that if we don’t take care of X, Y, and Z, if we don’t take care of the margins, we can lose at any time,” Mazzulla said.
Kristaps Porzingis said he can’t wait for tomorrow’s playoff opener. While he wasn’t on the roster for the previous Heat-Celtics matchups, he understands the history between the two teams and knows what is to come.
“We have to expect them to be ultra-aggressive, ultra handsy, trying to do all the little dirty things they can — not dirty things, but like, to mess up the game a little bit, to get some advantages,” Porzingis said. “We have to be ready for that. It’s gonna be a war.”
