Maybe Kevin Garnett was right. Perhaps, as he yelled at Boston’s 2008 NBA championship celebration, anything really is possible.
Even the impossible.
The Celtics are halfway through history, and that alone has gotten them into a very small club. Of the first 150 teams to lose a best-of-seven series 3-0 in NBA history, only 14 (9.3%) found a way to extend the matchup to Game 6.
None of them have won the series, and most usually win it, eliminated for now.
Not the Celtics. They’ve cut the deficit in the Eastern Conference finals against the Miami Heat to 3-2, while trailing the series but looking to have all the momentum going into Game 6 in Miami on Saturday night.
“Obviously, we don’t envision being in this position, down 3-0, but when adversity hits, you can see what a team is really made of,” Celtics forward Jaylen Brown said. “I mean, it couldn’t be worse than being down 3-0, but we didn’t look around, we didn’t go our separate ways. We stay together. We doubled what we’re good at on defense, and now I think it’s a series.”
Only three teams have gone from being down 3-0 to drawing 3-3; the Celtics could be fourth with a win on Saturday. No NBA team has fully escaped the 3-0 hole, but a win on Saturday would give Boston a chance to turn that around in Game 7, which would be on Monday on their court.
“One of our assistants put it in great perspective: Seasons are about nine months long and we just had a bad week,” Celtics coach Joe Mazzulla said. “Sometimes you have a bad week at work. Obviously, we didn’t pick the best time to have a bad week, but we did, and we stick together and fight like hell to keep it alive.”
Meanwhile, the Denver Nuggets are waiting for an opponent. If Boston wins the series, the Nuggets will visit the Celtics for Game 1 of the NBA Finals. If Miami wins the East, the Heat head to Denver for Game 1. Either way, the title series starts June 1, somewhere.
“We have to reinforce who we are and address the areas that maybe we haven’t been good enough at or the areas that we can clean up,” Nuggets coach Michael Malone said Friday after the team’s first real practice since who swept the Los Angeles Lakers for the Western Conference title. “But it’s very hard to keep up when you’re not playing NBA games.”
The Heat led by nine points going into the third quarter of Game 4, in position to perhaps win in a sweep. The lead was blown two and a half minutes later and the Celtics haven’t been down since. An 18-0 run in Game 4 put Boston on top of that game for good, a 12-0 run by the Celtics later in that game ended all doubt, and then they started Game 5 with a burst of 20-5.