The Boston Celtics Should Beat The Miami Heat

By: Steve Atkinson

The Boston Celtics should beat the Miami Heat in the Eastern Conference Finals. The series will probably go seven games because the Celtics love playing their best with their backs against the wall. The Celtics are the better team with the better players in Tatum and Brown.

The Boston Celtics Will Beat Miami

How much will coaching matter during the Eastern Conference Finals? I don’t think it will matter much. Spolestra is a good coach for Miami but Jimmy Butler has known to give up at times. Mazzulla is having a good season but he has the best player left in the playoffs. Tatum scored 51 points on Sunday. Mazzulla left him alone and let him do his thing.

“I was really excited just for the moment, to be able to come out and play today,” Tatum said after Sunday’s game. “It definitely was on my mind that I had played as bad as it could get for 42, 43 minutes. We have a saying, ‘It’s only up from here. Going into Game 6 — it sounds crazy, I was too locked in,” Tatum said. “I was too tight. I was too in my own head thinking about what I need to do. How many points I need to score. It’s a big moment.

 

“And today I was more myself. Pregame, I was relaxed, laughing, joking. That’s when I play my best, when I’m having fun. I just tried not to think about the pressure, what everybody is going to say. Just focus on the game and having fun.”

This could be Brown and Tatum’s time for a championship. The window couldn’t be any clearer than it is now. Take care of Miami then you either face Denver or the Lakers. I don’t care that the Lakers have LeBron he’s known to quit in big games too. Not only that but Tatum loves playing his best in front of LeBron. I’m sure it would mean a lot to him to beat LeBron for his first NBA Championship.

But first, it’s winning 4 games against the Miami Heat starting Wednesday.

“A team that we’re extremely familiar with,” Tatum said about the matchup with Miami. “A very well-coached team, they compete with the best of them, play hard. They defend, they make plays and they figure out a way to win games. It’s going to be fun; it’s going to be highly competitive and I’m looking forward to it.”

Joe Mazzulla also spoke after Sunday’s game and had this to say about the Boston Celtics performance.

You always come into a series with the expectation of how it’s supposed to go, and it’s just not how the playoffs are,” Celtics first-year coach Joe Mazzulla said. “We just handled the ebbs and flows of a series. Never got too emotionally high, too emotionally low. We had rough patches, but we were able to keep our emotional togetherness intact, which I think is important in the playoffs.”

Celtics win game one against the Heat Wednesday and lose on Friday. Then go from there either way the series is going seven games