A Season for the Ages?

Sometimes the simplest numbers are the most powerful.

The Boston Celtics are 27-3, and are playing .900 basketball. Only five other teams ever reached that threshold this late into a season—the 72-win Bulls, the 69-win Lakers, the 68-win Philadelphia 76ers, the 1969-70 New York Knicks, and the 1990-91 Portland Trailblazers,

Four of those five teams won NBA championships (the Portland Trailblazers, of course, lost to the Lakers. What else!!??).

Let’s take a moment to let this soak in.

Only five teams in the history of the NBA have started the season playing .900 ball after 30 games.

Bill Walton’s 50-10 Trailblazers didn’t do it. Hakeem Olajuwon’s 15-0/22-1 Houston Rockets didn’t do it. Most importantly, no Boston Celtics team in history has started a season playing .900 ball after 30 games. Not one.

16 NBA Championships and hall of famers bursting at the seems, but nary a start this good.

So, clearly, going 27-3 is doing something special.

If the Celtics play .600 ball the rest of the way, they’ll win 61 games.

If they play .700 ball the rest of the way, they'll win 63 games.

If they play .800 ball, and go 41-11, they'll win 68 games.

Winning eight out of every ten games the rest of the season sounds like a tall order. But barring injury, can we really say it is out of the question?

The way KG has this team locked and loaded, winning 60 is almost a foregone conclusion if key players stay relatively healthy. Given that every Celtic loss this season has been a close one and was immediately followed by a long winning streak, playing .800 ball seems like a reasonable goal for this squad.

And make no mistake, the Boston Celtics are getting better.

The team that almost lost to the Toronto Raptors in the second game of the season would not have swept 4 games in 5 nights on a West Coast trip against the Kings, Sonics, Jazz, and Lakers. The Paul Pierce who was tentative, turnover prone, and over-sharing the ball earlier in the season would not have felt comfortable taking over late in the last three games of the trip.

Speaking of dominating, Ray Allen is now finding his spots to assert himself in key parts of games as well. As for KG, the Lakers game on Sunday proved two things: 1) you don’t make KG mad; 2) KG can provide Russelesque performances when necessary in big games.

He followed up the Lakers performance by taking over the 4th quarter in a close game against the Rockets. So much for the theory that KG disappears during crunch of close games.

I’ve noted a couple of times this year that the Big 3 don’t seem to play big together in the same game. If we can now expect them all to bring their A-games in games that count, the sky is the limit for this team.

With 52 games left, plus the playoffs, there will be ample opportunity for this team to grow. The next big game is Saturday against the Pistons.

For now, I am drawing this distinction:

The Boston Celtics are playing great basketball, but they are not a great basketball team.

Great basketball teams win championships.

We'll save that appellation until June.