Charles Barkley Called Out The Celtics For An ‘Embarrassing’ Game 4 Effort

The NBA Finals are headed back to Boston after the Mavs finally asserted their place in the series with a dominant Game 4 performance, rolling up a 122-84 win on the Celtics.

Luka Doncic and Kyrie Irving combined for 50 points, while the Dallas bench came alive for the first time in the series, led by Dereck Lively II putting up a double-double (and his first career three) in the win. It was the Mavs best shooting performance of the series (50.5 percent from the field, 40.5 percent from three), and they coupled that with their best defensive outing, as they were flying around on defense and held the Celtics to 36.3 percent shooting as a team on the night.

For as fantastic an effort it was from the Mavericks, it was an equally poor performance from the Celtics. Boston seemed to either hope the Mavs would quit, or felt they’d rather have a chance to close things out in front of their home crowd. In any case, they just did not meet the energy or physicality of Dallas and now have given the Mavs at least a glimmer of hope. After the game, Charles Barkley noted his disgust with the “embarrassing” effort of the Celtics in a closeout game.

Unsurprisingly, Barkley was frustrated with Boston’s shot selection, as they took a bunch of threes early and couldn’t get them to fall. He is frequently fed up with the Celtics strategy of launching as many threes as possible, but he’s not wrong that the threes they were taking were often not looks created by good movement — which is, in part, a credit to Dallas rotating much better in Game 4. The volume of threes isn’t Boston’s problem, but how they get those looks that’s often the difference. In this game, Dallas shut off the rim and were able to stay attached to shooters, something they hadn’t done prior to this game. We’ll find out on Monday how much of that was genuine improvement on Dallas’ end and what was Boston going through the motions. For the Celtics sake, they’ll hope it was just a single game letdown and they’ll be back to their normal selves once back home for Game 5.