DENVER — The Celtics lost the season series against the defending champions Denver Nuggets on Thursday night in a hard fought 115-109 loss. The Celtics have a long road to navigate to even get to the NBA Finals for a possible rematch against the Nuggets or a host of other top tier Western Conference contenders in June. However, Charles Barkley made clear just how sky high his expectations are for the franchise on TNT’s Inside the NBA on Thursday night.
“If they don’t win a championship this year, it would be a total gag job because they have everything,” Barkley said.
The Celtics do have a commanding 4.5-game lead over the rest of the NBA with a 48-14 record despite the loss to the Nuggets. Still, it was evident at Ball Arena that the defending champions are clearly on the same level with the talented Celtics squad. While Barkley was challenged by the TNT panel about his claim including a weak Celtics bench, Barkley stood firm on his claim.
“You only play five players,” Barkley said. “They got Tatum, Brown, Jrue Holiday. Your rotation is going to shrink during the playoffs so the bench isn’t as important as you think it is. You got Brown and Tatum two of the best ten players in the league, probably. You got a great leader in Jrue Holiday. You have the best 6th man.”
The Celtics carried that kind of optimistic outlook about themselves even in the wake of their disappointing performance in Denver.
“I feel like we made a lot of mistakes,” Jaylen Brown said. “Obviously they’re a really good team and they capitalized off of that, but I think we kind of beat ourselves a little bit tonight. Free throws, turnovers, giving them layups. And with that being said, how many points did they have? 115? And offensively he could’ve been better. We turned the ball over. There’s a lot of stuff you could look at and the environment, intensity was great. So I think it’ll be a learning moment for our team.
“That’s what basketball is about. That’s what the journey is about. It’s about growth, it’s about improvement, it’s about team. And, uh, we gotta embrace the journey. You know, we’re not perfect. We expect that. So this is an opportunity for us to learn. Things didn’t go our way, but then the environment was great. The intensity level was great. We played hard and we had opportunities to win. Now we gotta be able to be smart.”
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