While the Knicks are preparing for their first Eastern Conference Finals appearance in 25 years, the Boston Celtics are looking back at what went wrong.
Celtics president Brad Stevens met with the media Monday and made his first public comments since his team lost 4-2 to the Knicks in the conference semifinals after sweeping them 4-0 during the regular season.
“Listen, the reality is we blew the first two games, right? And that’s why we put ourselves in a tough spot,” Stevens said. “I realize, and we all realize — listen, these leads go fast, these games go fast, but we had our opportunities and, yes, you can win when you’re down 2-0, but you’ve just diminished your margin for error.
“Because there’s going to be games like ours in Game 5 where we go nuts and we’re hard to beat that night, or ours in Game 3, where we’re hard to beat that night, but that just ties it. You still have to do that two more times.”
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The defending NBA champion Celtics blew 20-points leads late in the third quarter in both Games 1 and 2 -- while Jalen Brunson and the Knicks didn’t quit and kept chipping away at the huge leads.
Boston shot 25-of-100 from deep in the first two games in Boston, while also employing the “hack-a-Mitch” philosophy aimed at putting Knicks’ center Mitchell Robinson -- a notoriously poor foul shooter -- at the line.
Head coach Joe Mazzulla also opted not to call a timeout on the final possession of Game 2 when Mikal Bridges made a huge defensive play to seal the game.
“That’s not on any one person,” Stevens said. “That’s not out of maliciousness, that’s not a bad decision. It’s not bad luck. It’s, we had opportunities to win those first two home games, and then we put ourselves behind the eight ball, and New York gained what I thought was not only confidence, but momentum.
“They are peaking. You can see it. I think all four teams that are playing in these semifinals deserve to be there, and any of the four could win it. But credit New York for the way they played and the way they came back in those two games., specifically.”
The Celtics, of course, lost star forward Jayson Tatum to an Achilles injury in Game 4, while Kristaps Porzingis was battling what Stevens called a “post-viral syndrome, which is just lingering effects of a long illness.” ESPN’s Ramona Shelburne also reported that Jaylen Brown finished the season with a partially torn right meniscus.
Still, Stevens said the Celtics just didn’t execute when it mattered most.
“Sometimes it’s as simple as those are the margins,” Stevens said. “What I just mentioned — from winning and losing. We lost an overtime game at home in Game 1, and a game by one point in Game 2 that we’re up 16, 18, 20 [points] with 15 minutes to go in the game. So that’s the margin of error that you’re dealing with. …. I’ve said many times, like, we could easily have been up 3-1 when Jayson got hurt.
“But the reality is, we were probably not winning that game anyway. So we were going to be down 3-1. Last year in the Indiana series [in the Eastern Conference Finals], they could have easily been up 3-1 on us. And I think that that’s just kind of these series. You get these opportunities, and one team takes advantage of them, and that team usually moves on, and the Knicks did that.”
Adam Zagoria is a freelance reporter and Basketball Insider for NJ Advance Media. You may follow him on Twitter @AdamZagoriaand check out his Website atZAGSBLOG.com.