MILWAUKEE — A common refrain from the Boston Celtics this year when struggles popped up during the regular season was that things would be different when the playoffs roll around. The gap between the team’s on-paper talent and on-court execution was stunning, and the Celtics looked primed to let it go to waste. But this team was built with an eye on winning a championship, and while you can do plenty of good things for 82 nights from October to April, the most important thing is winning 16 playoff games en route to a ring.
Boston’s first four games — a first-round sweep of the Indiana Pacers — were good, but there was still skepticism due to the fact that Indiana was without their best player in Victor Oladipo. That meant the Celtics had the opportunity to make a statement in their fifth game of the playoffs, and after 48 minutes at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, they managed to do just that.
“Maybe there was a little bit of foreshadowing throughout the regular season,” Kyrie Irving said with a chuckle following the Celtics’ 112-90 drubbing of the Bucks in Game 1 of the Eastern Conference Semifinals. “We were dealing with our ups and downs, naturally, but I think that we just have an appreciation for the group that we have. We’ve spent at least two years together now, everyone is relatively healthy other than [Marcus Smart], so I think we have a good rhythm for the expectations that we have for each other.”
Irving, as he often is during Celtics wins, left his impact all over the place. His 26 points and 11 assists were both game-highs, along with seven rebounds and a handful of shots that took the life out of the arena, from the midrange fade-aways that only he can hit, to the circus layups straight out of a Jelly Fam compilation video. He was a star as he did everything Boston coach Brad Stevens said he is capable of before the game.
“He absolutely destroyed us two years ago,” Stevens said, referencing Irving’s performance against the Celtics as a member of the Cleveland Cavaliers during the 2017 Eastern Conference Finals. “In games, we’re down to 2-1 there, and we’re up 16, and he goes on a ridiculous run of scoring. We know what he can do and what he’s capable of, he’s been good for us all year.”
Irving has struggled at times this season with his role as team leader. Whether he openly said he felt the team hit rock bottom at one point, or called out his teammates for “selfish play” at another, there has been a perpetual war that Irving has waged as he’s been the unquestioned alpha dog on a team with legitimate title aspirations for the first time. It’s hard, and he’s shown it, but as Al Horford explained, when it came time for the rubber to meet the road, Irving raised the standard in Boston.
“Kyrie has been in our ear, even weeks before the regular season even ended, about the commitment and what we needed to do as a group and how we needed to prepare and be better,” Horford said. “I think all of the guys understood what he was trying to tell us, have taken up on that challenge of trying to be better and trying to do the little things to get us to this point.”
Horford had as good of an all-around performance in Game 1 as you’ll see out of the veteran big man. Offensively, he was immense, combining with Irving for a hellacious pick-and-roll attack en route to a 20-point outing. He also pitched in 11 boards. Where Horford stood out, though, was where all of the Celtics really imposed themselves: the defensive end of the floor.
In what got praised as a collective effort, Horford and the rest of his teammates held the Bucks to a meager 34.8 percent shooting from the field and 33.3 percent from deep. Khris Middleton praised the Celtics after the game for their defense, saying that the Bucks need to make it a point to do what they do best going forward and play with “pace” and “flow.”
“I think we hesitated some,” Middleton said. “That’s part credit to Boston’s defense. Their rotations were on point They made us second-guess a lot of our actions, our catch-and-gos and what not and our shots.”
The biggest factor on the tough night from the field, though, was how the magnificent Giannis Antetokounmpo was largely kept in check, going for 22 points on 7-for-21 shooting on the afternoon. On possession after possession, Antetokounmpo looked to lower his shoulder, get to the rim, and bully opponents as he’s managed to do all year.
The Celtics, when faced with this, managed to stay strong. Wave after wave of defender — from Horford, to Marcus Morris, to Aron Baynes, to Semi Ojeleye, to whomever else was tasked with pumping the brakes on the MVP frontrunner — went at Antetokounmpo, bringing a level of physicality that made it hard for him to get into the sort of rhythm that leads to him taking over games.
“He’s such a great player,” Horford said. “I think that our focus was that we just made it tough on him every time, all our guys at different times were on him and involved in the play, just making sure that he earned everything he got. I felt we did a really good job of that.”
“They were loading a lot, there were a lot of guys in the paint,” Antentokounmpo said of Boston’s defensive effort. “When they were guarding the paint and I tried to spin or change direction, there was a second guy there. I just have to go watch the tape. If they’re going to play like this the whole series, I just have to make the right pass and trust my teammates to knock down shots.”
Gumming up the works is something Boston does really well when they’re locked in, even with their best individual defender, Smart, on the bench due to an injury. But no one who watched the game on Sunday would say they were anything other than locked in. When this happens, every shot becomes a little more difficult, even the ones that should go in every single time.
“I think we missed a lot of open shots, but Boston did a great job just making it tough,” Middleton said.
Milwaukee’s plan moving forward is to, essentially, make sure those open shots fall. The Bucks were second in the league in effective field goal percentage this year, thanks in large part to the fact that when Antetokounmpo is able to penetrate, defenses are forced to either sell out and prevent him from getting easy twos, leaving space for shooters dispersed throughout the perimeter. It’d also help if the team was able to put the clamps on the Celtics’ offense, which hit 54 percent of its shots and nearly 42 percent of its attempts from deep.
In the eyes of one of the squad’s more battle-tested players, veteran point guard George Hill, a lack of energy specifically plagued the Bucks.
“It felt like, as a team, we didn’t make the extra effort,” Hill said. “Guys were too comfortable making shots. We can do better as a team, better individually. You have to tip your hat to Boston, they played a great game, moved the ball well and made us look like we didn’t know what we were doing out there sometimes.”
Antetokounmpo echoed this sentiment, saying, “There were glimpses and times that we played hard. Overall, that’s not us. We have to do a better job of playing defensively.”
Even if Milwaukee makes up for the apparent dearth of energy that existed on Sunday afternoon, that might not matter if the Boston team we’ve been waiting to see all year shows up three more times this series. Irving admitted that it’s totally possible the well of shots will dry up going forward — “Obviously it’s just one game, we’re not gonna shoot as well as we did,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s gonna happen, I hope it does.”
In the event that this series comes down to which team can out-talent the other for four games, Game 1 was everyone’s reminder that it’s awfully hard to compete with the Celtics when everyone brings their A-game. Sure, Boston’s regular season struggles were frustrating for those who waited to see them become the juggernaut they looked like on paper, but now that the postseason is here, reaching those expectations on a nightly basis has to happen, and the Celtics are prepared to embrace that challenge.
“Everything gets heightened so much,” Horford said. “The intensity, the fans, I just think the focus level goes way up. And for our group, that was something that I felt like we had a hard time during the regular season after some of us obviously, last year, going through a run and being in these type of positions, the coming to the regular season. It was tough to get to that stage, so I just think that once the postseason started, I think we all really have been able to lock in.”
