Doc's Celtics are Mentally Tougher than KC's

One pundit recently observed

Any player will tell you that there are nights when the basketball gods simply don’t want you to win. They normally come on the back end of a road trip, or the second night of a back-to-back. On those nights career 19 percent 3-point shooters go 5 for 5 from behind the line and players like Shaquille O’Neal don’t miss a free throw. It seems as if everything the other team throws up fall through the hoop and you’re playing in quicksand.

Just about any member of the 1985-86 Boston Celtics can offer testimony to corroborate this observation. Those Celtics lost only 15 games, but 14 of the Ls were to teams with a record of .500 or worse.

They lost 5 of nine in December, after starting the season 17-2. McHale has since said the Celtics could have won 70 games several times from 1981-1986, if they had been mentally tougher, hungrier, more focused.

I don’t know if McHale was right about his 70-win “post-dictions” (quick, what do you call a “prediction” about an event that has already taken place—such as “we would have won 70 games if such and such had occurred”), but he is almost assuredly correct about the regularly scheduled mental lulls that the impacted the Boston Celtics from his rookie year through at least 1986 and prevented them from having even more gaudy win and loss records.

There were at least three reasons for the mental lapses.

The first reason was boredom.

In the early- to mid- 1980s, there were really only three teams playing professional basketball, the Philadelphia 76ers, the Los Angeles Lakers, and the Boston Celtics. By 1984, the 76ers were out of the picture. By the 1985-86 season, Boston newspapers had run out of things to write about and were resorting to calls to “Bring on the Lakers”… in December. So if the only thing you are playing for is home-court advantage in June, forgive the GREEN if their focused strayed from time-to-time from October to March.

The second problem was that regular season focus hadn’t really proved all that valuable in the past.

The 1984-85 Celtics started out 15-1 and later 19-2, got home court advantage for the Finals, lost game two of the series at home, and then watched the Lakers walk away as champions in 6. The 1981-82 Celtics won 18 regular season games in a row at one point, and didn’t even get a sniff of the Finals by season’s end.

The final reason was beer.

Larry Bird and Rick Robey liked to drink the stuff in mass quantities, and, after Robey was traded to Phoenix, Bird told Robey that his leaving Boston was the main reason Bird won three straight MVPs. By 1986 Bird had found new drinking buddies in McHale and Walton and Sichting. Scott Wedman didn’t drink, and, as a result, was always clear-headed at practice, where he usually outperformed everyone.

“Come out with us at night, Scotty,” Bird used to tell Wedman, “and you won’t practice like that anymore.”

After the Celtics 1985 Christmas-Day Debacle against the New York Knicks, the Celtics swore off beer until championship number 16 was in hand.

We’re only 20 games into the 2007-08 season, but this year's Boston Celtics are not showing the same propensity for mental letdowns. To the contrary, this is the most intensely focused Celtics team Boston fans have watched since Heinshon and Cowens were roaming the parquet in the mid-1970s.

The fact that Paul Pierce, Ray Allen, and Kevin Garnett have never won a title helps keep Doc’s Celtics focused. The fact that Ray Allen and Kevin Garnett are consummate professionals also helps keep the Celtics focused. And the fact that KG is one of the most intense professionals ever to walk the planet definitely seems to be keeping this year’s Celtics on the straight and narrow.

But Doc’s Celtics are not immune from the kind of lapses that plagued KC Jones' Celtics. We’ve already heard KG intimate that he does not like to play day games. Minnesota fans remember more than one Sunday afternoon affair where even Mr. Intensity himself basically phoned-in his performance, taking the afternoon off.

There is more at stake now for KG in Boston than there was in Minnesota. This team represents his best shot at winning a title, and perhaps his last shot. In Minnesota the Timberwolves didn’t have the likes of Russell, Hondo, and others Celtic Elders peering down from courtside and over his shoulder. The Wolfies didn’t have a history of 16 titles, teams with multiple 60-win seasons and a basketball tradition second-to-none.

Remember that KG introduced himself to Celtics fans as a student of history. Clearly, then, KG knows the history that precedes him and will continue to do everything in his power to leave his own footprint in the sand.