After rallying to beat the Hawks on Monday, the Celtics have won eight games in a row — the longest active winning streak in the NBA. Their starters are obliterating teams even after slow starts in their last two wins. They reportedly got their primary target at the trade deadline. If the old axiom that “defense wins championships” holds true, they will face the Warriors in the NBA Finals.
That’s crazy, of course … right? On Dec. 28, after a brutal loss to an incredibly short-handed Timberwolves team — which Ime Udoka called “one of the poorest losses of the year — we wrote that “We can’t call that loss ‘shocking’ or ‘inexplicable’ because it was neither,” and man, did we mean it.