MIAMI– There has been a notion in the NBA for years that the game changes when the postseason arrives.
Joe Mazzulla disagrees.
In the eyes of the Boston coach, nothing really changes from the regular season to the playoffs. It’s a game. Show up and play. That’s what he expected when the season started in October, that’s what he expects now that it’s April and it looks like that’s what he’ll expect if the Celtics are still playing when the NBA Finals roll around in June as well.
“For me, I know it’s mundane and the playoffs create a lot of hysteria, but there’s no difference between a regular season and a playoff game,” Mazzulla said after Game 3 of the Boston-Miami series. to bring it, mentally, physically and emotionally. You just have to bring it and run it.
There seem to be some who agree with Mazzulla’s way of thinking.
Take Denver center Nikola Jokic, for example. The defending champion Nuggets lost in Los Angeles to the Lakers on Saturday night, missing a chance for a four-game first-round sweep. Denver will have another chance to advance when the series returns to the home of the Nuggets on Monday night.
“We will win or we will lose,” Jokic said. “Let’s see what will happen. We hope we can win at home. After that, if we lose, we will have another opportunity.”
It really can’t be simpler than that.
There are certainly some arguments that playoff basketball and regular season basketball are different. Entering Sunday — albeit with a much smaller sample size — teams have scored 103.8 points per game so far in the first round, a 9.1% drop from the regular season rate of 114.2 per game. Other notable stat drops: field goal percentage (45% of playoffs, 47% of regular season) and 3-point percentage (34% of playoffs, 37% of regular season).
“I think there’s a difference, for sure,” Celtics forward Jaylen Brown said. “It’s much more intense. The pressure increased a little. But at the end of the day, it’s just basketball. We just come out and execute and we’re the team that plays harder. We shouldn’t see a difference.”
There’s a difference: those situations where losing by 3-something in a series bring an urgency that doesn’t exist for most of the regular season, all the way to those games at the end where a team faces elimination from postseason contention.
“It’s one game at a time,” Lakers coach Darvin Ham said as his team faced elimination at the hands of Denver. “That’s all we have is the next game.”
Clearly, this changes things. But the Celtics are nowhere near elimination in their series with Miami, up 2-1 — which is why Mazzulla can rightly insist that postseason play is basically the same as regular season play.
“At the end of the day, the game is pretty simple,” Mazzulla said. “You have to find the simple things that you can execute, the simple things that you can take away, and then that’s how you bring the right mindset and physicality.”
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