“Shipping Up to Boston?” Actually, no, it’s more like “No Sleep Till Brooklyn” as the #7 seed Celtics will take on the Nets in the first round of the NBA playoffs. The Boston Celtics secured the No. 7 seed and berth into the real tournament with a 118-100 play-in game victory over the Washington Wizards last night.
However, with no Jaylen Brown, the Celts are largely expected to really have little to no chance against the Nets, and their stay in the postseason is expected to be short. Head Coach Brad Stevens will have to live up to all his hype, and then some, in order to pull this off. NBA playoffs.
You can find out which way BetQL’s model is picking for this week and weekend’s NBA playoff play-in games. The Celtics are priced at -8 or -110 for game one, which tips off Saturday night from the Barclay’s Center at 8:05pm. The over/under is 226. Title odds for Boston are about +9000, and that makes sense given how the ESPN BPI gives them just a 20% chance of advancing to the second round.
For Brad Stevens, he needs to figure out how to overcompensate for the loss of Brown, AND how to contain the best big three in the league today: James Harden, Kyrie Irving and Kevin Durant. Jayson Tatum stepped up against the Wizards in the play-in, and he’s the alpha dog now.
He and Kemba Walker will share the scoring workload, while Tatum will be tasked with trying to contain Durant.
Good luck with that.
It seemed like the Celtics were on the verge of returning to their glory years, lately, with three Eastern Conference Finals appearances in the past four seasons. However, in the Garden the standards are lofty, it’s pretty much NBA titles or nothing. This team will fall well short of that.
Paul M. Banks runs The Sports Bank, partnered with News Now. Banks, the author of “No, I Can’t Get You Free Tickets: Lessons Learned From a Life in the Sports Media Industry,” has regularly appeared in WGN, Sports Illustrated, Chicago Tribune and SB Nation. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram.