"We're going to fight Celtic! We're going to beat Celtic!"
Six days ago, near the end of the Miami Heat and Chicago Bulls game, fans at the Cassia Center began raising their arms and chanting. For the remaining 28 teams in the league, they had never heard such a strange request in their lives.
The Celtics have been the top powerhouse in the East for the past few years, and they have bolstered their roster this season with Jrue Holiday and Kristaps Porzingis, who have a break-leading 64-18 regular season record, and 43 out of 127 NBA players in The Athletic's secret ballot predict that the Celtics will win this year's championship, second only to defending champions the Denver Nuggets. Most people will admit that this team is the top two favorites in the league, and their chances of reaching the Finals — given Giannis' injury and Embiid's look dead — are even higher than the Nuggets in the West. What team would love to meet them in the first round?
Perhaps only the Miami Heat, who have played them three times in the last four years and sent them home twice.
Adebayo expressed his confidence before the match: "We always say, 'We are not your average eighth seed'. For some reason, I also believe that people know this. ”
It's part of the Heat culture. Over the years, the Heat have developed a unique team culture. They're happy to be dogs, they're happy to play physically, they're happy to pull teams that look stronger and more talented than them into the mud, and then use their experience to beat the pride of the sky. They're also happy to put some harsh words before the game, and then most of the time, they can deliver on those words. They always convince themselves that this team can do the impossible.
Not everyone believes in the power of "Heat Culture." In the eyes of a large number of people, the utopia created by Pat Riley and Spoelstra on the South Coast is essentially an idealist that is no different from witchcraft, hexagrams, and dancing gods, and can be called a kind of self-talking "basketball venerable". No matter how glamorous their past record may be and how miraculous they may seem on the surface, a Heat without Jimmy Butler and Terry Rozier will never be able to defeat the Celtics, armed to the teeth. From the basic logic of basketball, as long as the Celtics can do a good job of basic defense, don't lose too far away in rebounding and turnovers, and don't shoot 0 of 27 consecutive three-point shots, then their scoring ability is fully enough to beat this mediocre team......
Is that really the case?
Yesterday we saw a magical game where Celtic looked ready for most of the game. The Heat made 13 three-pointers in the first half? There's nothing to fear, we're still ahead. The Heat's defense looked completely incapable of bothering Tatum and Brown, who scored 39 points on 16-of-27 shooting in the first half, including three three-pointers that Brown hit in the final minute of the first half. The audience fully believes that the Heat's hot hand is just a flash in the pan, and the double tanhua can lead the league's No. 1 Haoqiang to win easily. They led by as many as 34 points in the first game of the series, which led many to believe that the Celtics would sweep their opponents in four games and that losing one would be disrespectful to themselves. The Celtics' players looked to think the same way, as they entered the second half with the league's top legacy, unbreakable confidence and a three-point advantage.
Jovic hit a three-pointer and the Celtics were on top. Jaime Harkes Jr. hit a three-pointer and the Celtics were unmoved. Herro hit a three-pointer and the Celtics looked calm. Martin hit a three-pointer and the Celtics looked like a lake. Duncan Robinson hit a three-pointer and the Celtics took it in stride. Hayward Highsmith and Deron Wright hit three-pointers as the Celtics were defeated.
It's not that the Heat didn't say hello before the game, it's just that everyone didn't take those tips to heart. The day before the game, Spo made an intriguing comment about how the team would come back in the series: "We need to shoot more and better three-pointers to keep up with the Celtics, and I get that...... Of course, it's not possible to shoot 50 threes in a game, that's unrealistic. ”
Maybe 50 three-point shots isn't realistic, but the Heat proved they could take 43 shots and then hit 23 of them. Caleb Martin admitted after the game that Spo had every Heat player to shoot resolutely when he had the opportunity: "I think it's because he realized that he's going to hurt us when he's going to shoot when it happens." Besides, we're a good shooting team, and we shouldn't hesitate outside the three-point line. ”
As he put it, 62.2% of the Heat's scoring comes from three-pointers, which is a stark example of "change from quantity to quality." The Celtics can accept the Heat to use cold arrows when the offense and defense transition, and they can accept the bottom corner of a few role players after over-assisting, but if every non-space point to be released in the plan is put in a hundred steps, the Celtics are full of iron and can't withstand the 48 minutes of non-stop storm and rain of Nan Wu Gatlin.
After the game, Celtics coach Mazzulla was asked a question by reporters, "Is it a good thing for a team like the Celtics to lose a playoff game first"?
We can think of this issue as a step, but Mazzulla didn't go down the stairs, he chose to get stuck there awkwardly to serve as a wake-up call to his team: "You lose a home game and you fall into adversity, which is unfortunate, but this is the playoffs. ”
We can remember this day for a moment. If the Celtics win a team from the West in the Finals sometime in June, there's a good chance that some people in green championship t-shirts will think back to that day. The Celtics' loss to the Miami Heat woke them up, made them learn from their pain, brought them together, and blah blah. In short, the defeat against their old rivals cheered them up and gave them enough energy to overcome adversity.
But that imagination is too far away. At this moment, the Celtics just need to take the Heat as quickly, accurately, and ruthlessly as possible in order to better prepare for the tougher battles ahead. What's more, if the Celts need to learn from adversity, they have experienced too much. What did they learn from trailing the Heat 3-0 last year and losing 3-3? What did they learn from trailing the Warriors 2-3 the year before? What do they expect them to learn from a night like this if they go through that and they still get into adversity?
In fact, they just didn't learn anything. All they knew was that Spo had a three-point strategy that made everyone shoot wildly, and the players threw more than they could. As Jaylen Brown said after the game: "I think their coach has a good game plan for them, and they are confident and execute it well when they come on the pitch......
Mazzulla may have learned a little more than Brown, acknowledging after the game that after the Heat's historic shooting performance, of course, more pressure should be put on their pitchers off the court, but at the same time he reminded his players that there was no need to overreact to it: "We have to find a balance because a lot of the Heat's shooters are also good breakers, and we have to find the balance and make sure we don't open the gap on the other side in order to close one gap." ”
Mazzulla understands too much. In the first game of the Eastern Conference finals last year, the Heat shot 16-of-31 three-pointers, in the second game, the Celtics tightly grasped the Heat's long-range shots, and were repeatedly beaten into a sieve by the Heat's repeated sudden points, and in the third game, the Celtics rearranged their positional defense, and the Heat once again returned with 35-of-19 three-pointers. Mazzulla didn't want to see this kind of situation when he pressed the hoist to float the scoop again.
In terms of conventional logic, the Heat are clearly at a disadvantage, and Mazzulla can fully regard their high shooting percentage in this game as an anomaly, and it will be business as usual in the next game. But considering that they're the Celtics and they're facing the Heat, is there necessarily a higher risk of not making a change than if you make a change? What if you don't make a change, what if you get shot again? What if you make a change, and if something else goes wrong in the end?
This kind of game is like a mille-feuille, it is easy to have a scene where you think you predicted his prediction, and as a result, he predicts your prediction and predicts his prediction, and once you start to think according to Spo's logic and fall into his eight-odd field, Spo successfully turns the game that was originally a nine-open game into a five-five-open.
Even if you dismiss the Heat culture in private and sneer at them in the media, as soon as you let Spo win a game, you start to fear that he will use this game as a fulcrum to win this series, especially when he faces Mazzulla. Like Jimmy Butler's post-game Instagram post, he stuck his face on a picture of Brown last season, repeating the same rhetoric Brown made when the Celtics were down 3-0.
"It's better not for us to win. ”