Jayson Tatum didn’t exactly say that the Denver Nuggets were the only team that could have beaten the Boston Celtics last season, but, in interview with Gary Washburn of The Boston Globehe said he was surprised the Nuggets didn’t make it out of the Western Conference. And by the sounds of it, when the Minnesota Timberwolves eliminated Denver in the second round of the playoffs, he wasn’t exactly disappointed.
From the Boston Globe:
“People always ask me, when did you guys know you were going to win a championship?” Tatum said. “When Minnesota beat Denver, I felt like Denver was the only team they matched up against us the best. I thought we were going to play Denver in the Finals and it was going to be good.
“But when we were in Dallas and we went up, 3-0, oh my God. Nobody ever comes back from 0-3, so I remember going back to the locker room and I remember saying, I don’t know what the game is going to be, but we’re going to win the championship. That was a strange feeling that I couldn’t sleep that night and I remember the morning of the 4th game, and I was never in the position that if we win tonight, we are champions and everyone tried to act normal. We were down by like 30. We were so worried so tight. But I knew when we got home for Game 5, we were going to win.”
The Celtics lost both of their regular-season meetings against the Nuggets. On January 19 at TD Garden, they entered the game with a 20-0 record at home, but Nikola Jokic and Jamal Murray combined for 69 points on 29-for-43 shooting to make it 20-1. On March 7, despite 41 points from Jaylen Brown, Boston came up short in Denver, where Jokic recorded a 32-point triple. Both games went down to the wire, and they both felt like Final previews. They could have been, too, if the Nuggets hadn’t blown a 20-point lead in the second half of Game 7 against the Timberwolves.
Before going 16-3 in the finals, Boston went 64-18 in the regular season. No team has come close to that record, nor the Celtics’ plus-11.7 point differential. They had a historically dominant season, and it’s possible that if Denver beat Minnesota and then beat the Dallas Mavericks, it would have gone down in five games in the Finals just like Dallas did. For what it’s worth, then-Nuggets guard Kentavious Caldwell-Pope said further Draymond Green’s podcast that they had “no gas” in the playoffs and should have lost to the Los Angeles Lakers in the first round. Denver won that series 4-1, but had to overcome double-digit deficits in three of their wins. Murray had two game-winners against the Lakers and scored 35 points in Game 7 against Minnesota, but overall wasn’t nearly as effective as usual in the playoffs (40.2% from the field, 31.5% from deep, 47.4% true shooting) while dealing with injuries to and his calf and his elbow.
Denver, however, was the only team to sweep its season series against Boston. The Nuggets were the defending champions at the time, and getting into a battle of execution with a Jokic-led team is generally a scary proposition. If you’re still wondering what would have happened if they had made it to the Finals, you’re not alone. Saying that he thought the matchup was “going to be good,” Tatum undersells it. Leading up to the playoffs, this was the Final many wanted to see. It had the potential to be an absolute classic.
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