The NBA doesn’t stand a chance against the Celtics

I’m totally biased. I’m ignoring tons of data. I’m publishing this in the one community where this chicanery wouldn’t be met with professional consequences. In short, I can’t reasonably be trusted. But I’m telling you, man. The rest of the NBA stands no chance against the Celtics.

Maybe Banner 18 injected an elephant’s dose of liquid swag into my much-tortured green soul, but I feel so much more confident about Boston this year than I did last year. So confident, in fact, that I’m willing to say that the rest of the league stands no chance. None. Zero. Adding up their cumulative chances would be like adding up the money in the Lehman Brothers’ accounts in 2008. There’s just nothing there. Where did it all go?

Some NBA analysts would still tell you the rest of the league is “too big to fail,” and there are obviously a bunch of stats that would tell you they all stand a very real chance against the Celtics. Betting markets aren’t nearly as lopsided as they were last season. The Celtics are third in offensive rating and tenth in defensive rating. They don’t even have the best record in their own conference, with the Cleveland Cavaliers’ season currently going 115% as well as everyone thought it could be going.

But it’s a mirage. The league, in fact, hasn’t a snowball’s chance in an Albuquerque summer of beating the Celtics, because Boston’s snowball is sitting at the top of Mount Rainer, ready to accumulate all the snow from the snowiest place in the United States and steamroll the league once they get a push.

Counting, advanced or even heavily-doctored stats are irrelevant in this case. Ultimately, whether or not you think the NBA stands a chance against Boston comes down to your opinion of life itself: do things tend to go right or do they tend to go wrong?

At least in basketball, things tend to go wrong. In fact, the sport is designed to make sure that happens. The three-point line is intentionally far enough away to make sure missing is much more likely than making a shot, injuries are everywhere (just ask the Orlando Magic) and the league has hard-coded advantages for offensive players into their officiating that even the best teams are susceptible to a Jordan Poole 40-bomb ruining their Tuesday night.

In the NBA, you have to expect that your entire plan for success will get shoved into a locker, loaded onto a pickup truck and driven off the Hoover Dam by the time the playoffs start. Reliable shooters will go ice-cold. Star players will get their obligatory knee or ankle soreness in March like it’s jury duty. No team in the NBA is built for everything going wrong.

Except, of course, the Boston Celtics.

I’ll prove this with a simple thought experiment: let’s say that every team in the league is playing the Dallas Mavericks, the quintessential good-but-like-how-good-exactly team the league has to offer. If you removed the best player from every team before their game against the Mavericks, how many would still be favored to win?

Losing your best player is the ultimate thing-going-wrong. Maybe the Oklahoma City Thunder could still be favored, but with Chet Holmgren already injured long-term, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander’s absence would probably make them underdogs. The Cavaliers might be able to eat a Donovan Mitchell absence in betting markets, but I doubt it.

Everyone else either was already an underdog or would definitely be. Except for the Celtics, who would certainly still be favored if Jayson Tatum took the night off. I’m not even sure how much the line would move, and maybe one day I’ll ask DraftKings to set this experiment up. But to me, the Mavericks are the line between contender and not, and the Celtics are the only team in the league that could lose their best player and still be a contender.

The Celtics are hyper-insulated against disaster. They tore through the league in October and November without Kristaps Porzingis, and now he’s back. I’m not saying the Celtics will stay completely healthy, but they are much abler to endure the freak injuries to elite players that every contender lives in fear of than the rest of the league.

Photo by Bart Young/NBAE via Getty Images

They’re also the most protected from variance, shooting a truly-unbelievable number of threes as they did on their way to a championship last year. If you’re screaming, “but doesn’t their boatload of threes make them much more susceptible to variance?!” No, let me explain.

This word “variance” has come to dominate NBA discourse, and rightly so. Three pointers have a lower probability of going in than shorter-range looks, so relying on them for a record-high proportion of your points seems like a risky strategy. But amazingly, it’s actually the opposite! The Celtics need to shoot about 38 percent as a team over time to be borderline-unbeatable, but like applying any trend stat to a single game, “variance” is more of an issue the fewer number of shots you actually take — smaller sample sizes = less reliable trends. The Celtics are actually protecting themselves from variance by taking a ton of shots, as so long as the number keeps going up, it’s less and less likely to fail. It’s crazy, but I like crazy.

And beyond their insurance policies, I’ve just been watching basketball and have seen nothing from the rest of the league that suggests anyone could beat the Celtics four times in seven games. I wrote that I thought the Knicks had the blueprint very early in the season, but I have completely changed my tune. The Celtics, structurally, can play any kind of basketball, beat any kind of team and have more elite options than arguably any team ever.

I’m not saying the Celtics are guaranteed to win the NBA Finals again, I’m just saying the rest of the NBA doesn’t stand a chance at stopping them. The Celtics could still stop themselves by running out of insurance policies, but they are by far the best positioned team for everything to go wrong, which it will. In short, Boston is the best, and I won’t hear arguments to the contrary.