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 an interview with The Boston Globe’s Gary Washburn, he said he was surprised the Nuggets didn’t make it out of the Western Conference. And by the sound 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 that they matched up best with us. I thought that we were going to play Denver in the Finals and it was going to be a good one.
“But when we were in Dallas and we went up, 3-0, oh my God. Nobody has ever come back from 0-3, so I remember getting back to the locker room and I remember saying, I don’t know what game it’s going to be, but we’re going to win the championship. That was a weird feeling. I wasn’t able to sleep that night and I remember the morning of Game 4 we had shootaround, and I had never been in the position that if we win tonight, we’re champions. We were at shootaround and everybody was trying to act normal. I couldn’t take a nap. We lost by like 30. We wanted to win so bad. We were so anxious and so tight. But I knew when we were coming back home for Game 5, we were going to win.”
The Celtics lost both of their regular-season meetings against the Nuggets. On Jan. 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, with Jokic recording a 32-point triple-double. Both games went down to the wire, and they both felt like Finals previews. They might 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 playoffs, Boston went 64-18 in the regular season. No team came close to that record, nor to the Celtics’ plus-11.7 point differential. They had a historically dominant season, and it’s possible that, had Denver beaten Minnesota and then beaten 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 on 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 its wins. Murray made two game-winners against the Lakers and scored 35 points in Game 7 against Minnesota, but overall wasn’t nearly as efficient as usual in the playoffs (40.2% from the field, 31.5% from deep, 47.4% true shooting) while dealing with injuries to both his calf and his elbow.
Denver, however, was the only team to sweep its season series against Boston. The Nuggets were the defending champs 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’ve happened if they’d made it to the Finals, you’re not alone. By saying that he thought the matchup “was going to be a good one,” Tatum is underselling it. Leading up to the playoffs, this was the Finals that many wanted to see. It had the potential to be an absolute classic.
