The unhappy farmer – CelticsBlog

I did not grow up on a farm, nor do I live on a farm now. But I know farmers, and I have known farmers my entire life.

Fertilizer does quite a bit to improve yield in different soil conditions for the modern farmer, and hybrids, some genetically engineered, and some engineered the good old-fashioned way, with field work, do a lot to make up for short growing seasons and dry weather when they come along.

But the one variable that has remained stubbornly out of control is rain.

Sure, you can irrigate your fields, but that water ain’t free and neither are the sprinklers that spread it around.

Today’s farmer has as much control over precipitation as the first guy who plowed the first field way back whenever that was.

Naturally, this bugs a lot of farmers.

However, I have met farmers who have griped about every sort of rain you can imagine. For them, the rain comes too soon, or it comes too late. It comes down too hard, or it is so light that it just makes things muddy. Rain keeps them out of their fields during planting and harvest. No rainfall has ever met their approval. They seem to be awaiting some future perfect growing season that is never going to come.

You see where I’m going with this, don’t you?

There are media folks who will have to be dragged kicking and screaming to the “Celtics are a very good team, actually,” table, and once at that table, they will complain about the food on offer, assuming that they’ll even eat.

But it’s not just the media.

There are Boston fans who decided long ago that nothing good can come of this Celtics team. Should they win a championship, these fans will not be happy. They will insist that the team should have won one sooner.

I am here to tell you that these complaints say much more about the complainer than they do about the Celtics.

You can tell a lot about a person by the way they talk about others.

I don’t know why there is a subset of Celtics fans, a minority, it seems, but a very vocal one, who do not like this team, but their existence cannot be questioned.

This was abundantly apparent during Game 1.

Sure, Boston and Indiana played multiple games during the regular season, but no games were played with the lineups on offer Tuesday night (Pacers with Pascal Siakam, C’s without Kristaps Porzingis). Rick Carlisle, lest we forget, has won championships both as a player and as a coach, and even if there is a style of play that these Pacers are best at, Carlisle is a careful and deliberate coach, and his Pacers are not going to go down easily, even if they are dispatched in four or five games.

Tuesday’s game was not the sixth meeting of the two teams this season: it was the first meeting of the two teams in the playoffs.

The earliest moves in a chess match between masters who have never played each other before, who haven’t even seen each other play before, will bear little resemblance to how the game and series ultimately turns out. Each player has to figure out what the other player knows, how they play, what their preferences are. Once that’s known, play can begin in earnest.

Tuesday night’s game was the ‘opening’ of a chess match. The Celtics ultimately came away the winner, but that, in the long run, may not be the most important outcome of the game.

If you’re the C’s coaching staff, you can spend as much time as you want analyzing and reanalyzing the Pacers’ play against the Bucks and the Knicks, but it would take a coach much more foolish than Carlisle to attempt the same strategies against the Celtics that were deployed against Milwaukee or New York. Yes, the personnel are known quantities at this point, as are the team’s repertoire of half-court sets. However, the most effective sets against the C’s may have been deployed only a handful of times per game against their first two opponents.

That’s why the most important thing to come out of game 1 was probably the film.

And that’s why getting bent out of shape because the C’s didn’t blow the Pacers out of the water says more about the complainer than it does about the Celtics.

Photo by Barry Chin/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

Look, the Pacers are in the Eastern Conference Finals. You can look at their regular season through whatever lens you wish, but the bottom line is that they are good enough to be in the Eastern Conference Finals. This team is not a pushover, and, again, even if the Cs dispatch them in four or five games, those games are likely to be hard fought.

Another reason to discount the outcome of the game–even though Boston _won_–was their three-point shooting. The Celtics had a bad night from beyond the arc. The three-point shot, valued because every attempt is usually worth more than a typical two-point attempt, was a positive liability for the C’s last night. Their conversion rate of 33% meant that each shot was worth one point on average, while their 60% conversion rate for two-point attempts made each shot worth 1.2 points on average.

But at least one three-point shot on Tuesday shouldn’t have been a two. That was Jaylen Brown’s rather impressive make with the clock running down in regulation. A make that followed his deflection causing a Pacers turnover. Jaylen Brown saved the day—or did he?

Starting at the six-minute mark, Brown missed shots on consecutive possessions, turned the ball over and then missed two three-point shots that bracketed a make by Al Horford. In other words, he screwed up on five of seven consecutive possessions during a crucial stretch of the fourth.

So who is Jaylen Brown? Are his critics right in pointing out that his last second heroics were only necessary because of his earlier gaffes and that, therefore, they are justified in taking a jaundiced view of him?

Only up to a point.

You see, here’s what the detractors miss.

Anyone could’ve screwed up that sequence. Slap a Cs jersey on me, and you better believe I could go out there and do what Jaylen Brown did during that stretch. Not to brag or anything, but my ability to miss shots is right up there with the best of ’em.

But how many people could have done what he did in the final seconds?

And that’s the difference.

Does this mean that we should ignore Jaylen’s earlier gaffes? Of course not. But you can be aware of something without focusing your entire attention on it.

The last last last vestiges of hero ball for a maturing basketball player are going to be their actions in the closing minutes. And you can say that these guys should know better, and I agree with you up to a point. They should, they’ve been told, but this is a deeply rooted view of the game we’re talking about here.

It’s a peculiarly mature player who realizes, in his early twenties, that even if he’s the best player on the court, he might not be the best player to take this particular shot.

Brown and Tatum are getting there. But the last place for them to grow up, the hardest point in which to root out that ‘one-on-one’ thinking is during crunch time. They’re getting there, but they’re not there yet. You can say this without getting on their case the way some fans do.

If you find yourself unable to celebrate blowouts because you think that means that the other team is awful, and you find yourself unable to celebrate close wins because you think that every game should be a blowout, then perhaps the Celtics are not the problem here.

These farmers that complain about the rain? They bring in a crop every year. None of them have lost their farms because it rained in the middle of April instead of the beginning of May. Every year they bring in a harvest and every year they gripe about how the rain messed things up. So maybe, just maybe, the rain isn’t the reason why they’re perpetually grumpy.

And if you find yourself grousing about Tatum and Brown after wins and after losses, maybe, just maybe, they’re not the problem.

If you find yourself forgetting that Boston was the only team to win 60 games this season, and that they have a 9-2 record in the playoffs, because you’re still griping about Joe Mazzulla, maybe Mazzulla’s not the problem here.

Look, I’m no optimist. I’m not a Pollyanna.

I lost my Dad in February of this year, and before he died, he asked me to come up to watch the South Dakota State Jackrabbits in the FCS playoffs. When he asked me that, something he’d never done before, it made me wonder if his health was much worse than he was letting on.

But I dismissed the thought because even if I was right, it would have cast a pall over the last two months I had with him. It was bad enough seeing him those last few days without spending the previous months thinking about how soon they would arrive.

You gotta enjoy the wins no matter how they come along.