You know, this is a good point. I hadn't thought about it but in years past, a game like Sunday's would've seen Tatum throwing hissy fits every few minutes and probably gotten him a T. Last game - nothin'. Thanks for pointing it out, it's hard to notice absence sometimes.
It's funny because league rules allow them to just say "rest" for Horford, because of his age.
I’m old school and still want to secure home court over the Western Conference champ also.
As noted it's now a 4.5 game lead in that regard, but it's over Minnesota, who has just the 4th best odds to win the west. 2nd place is OKC (5.5 games behind Boston), who has just the 5th best odds to win the west. Denver (7 games behind Boston), Clippers (6.5 games behind Boston) and Phoenix (10 games behind Boston) are 1st, 2nd and 3rd. Plus, Boston has just the 27th hardest schedule remaining, the easiest of any team in contention for the best record. Denver has the 24th hardest, OKC is 23rd, Minnesota 22nd, Cleveland 16th, Clippers are 7th, Milwaukee is 3rd and Phoenix is 1st.
What's kinda crazy is that the C's really could have more wins at this point, but they've been load managing the entire season resting guys (and usually one or two members of the starting five) almost every game... crazy that they could even be better at this point.
The Nets had to know they were in trouble when Boston decided that garbage time began in the 1st quarter.
The team hasn’t reached its potential, it hasn’t peaked, they aren’t being challenged for the #1-seed….and Mazzulla still has them focused to come out with this type of defensive effort on the second leg of a B2B when the players minds could have easily been elsewhere. This is a special group.
Will the C's continue to win 78% of their games? Probably not.
The team has had exactly one ten game stretch where they played at 60% (and none worse). The idea that they will drop to that level over the last 27 games is highly improbable. I could see a dip to 70%, which would be 19-8. I would personally take the over on that but around 19-20 wins strikes me as a reasonable expectation for the rest of the season after accounting for the fact that the team will almost certainly have locked up home court sometime early in April.
Even when the starters are resting we are rolling out Pritchard, Hauser and some other guys that are motivated to put some good tape out there. I don't think we'll see a huge drop off in win %. My guess would be between 20-22 wins going out.
Easy schedule, but 15/27 on the road hurts a little bit. Still, they are in a fantastic position to get the 1 see.
6 games in 9 nights (March 17, 18, 20, 22, 23, 25, with off-days on the 19th, 21st and 24th), but it's still a pretty tough stretch. Thankfully, 5 of those 6 games are against total patsies(@WAS, DET, @DET, @CHI, @ATL), and the sixth is the 3/20 home game vs the Bucks with a day off on either side. Could be worse.
Yeah I still haven’t gotten this easiest schedule stuff I’ve been hearing for over a month now. I mean it’s easy for us bc we’re so good which makes it easier than anyone else but there isn’t anything especially abnormal nor has there been all year. Marginal stuff that isn’t really relevant imo.
People are just talking about an objective fact: the Celtics started the year playing teams with a high combined winning %, and now they will play a schedule with a much lower opponent winning %.
As we've seen several times (& last night) this team is DEEP enough to run 4-5 of their TOP6 and still blow out non-playoff teams (1 loss versus a sub .500 team). Jaylen also missed the 40pt blowout against Memphis recently.
This is less of a big deal in the NBA than in the NFL, SOS tends to be fairly close to even for everyone by the end of the year. The current spread between the team with the hardest schedule thus far (GS, .519) and the team with the easiest schedule (Philly, .480) is .039. That number will get a lot smaller by year end, here's what the spread was the last few years:
Make sure you switch it to the monthly option! I tried yearly, no good, then monthly worked.
Yeah, totally agree - just seeing people say it's the "Third easiest schedule" and it seems like that's fairly meaningless because of what you stated, but as the number of games gets smaller, the fact that the Celtics opponents are always playing the best team in the league will distort the data.
Same
I've always seen this team winning 62 games. That's a record of 19-8 the rest of the way. If they accomplish that, which seems very doable for this squad, the Cavaliers (who have 2 games in hand, but who have already los the tiebreaker to the C's) would need to go 27-2 to beat them for the top seed.
I recall pundits talking about how the 3 "other" AFC East teams had some the NFL's toughest schedule in 2007. They forgot to take into account that each of those teams had to play a 16-0 Patriots team twice.
The thing is, the NBA has enough games that this effect is pretty dampened. I don't have enough time to go back and add up the whole season, but the Celtics tough January stretch had tough travel and a roughly .540 opponents' win%.
I think it's fair to say the following are correct:
Agreed on all of that. My main point was #1: the Celtics played a tough schedule in the first 2/3 of the season, and some of their primary challengers (Mil, Phi) didn't. This resulted in those teams seeming closer to Boston in quality than they are.
Thanks for posting. Taylor puts out a lot of good content; I'm impressed. I suspect that this particular blog will go subscription next year.
To be clear, my question was strictly about forward- looking SOS and how easy the rest of the season looks ranked against the league. All 27 remaining Celtic opponents face a team with a 79% win pct and the Celtics don’t, so that exaggerates the SoS for those teams and makes the Cs look comparatively easy.
