In a Recent interview with John Karalis in Boston Sports JournalBoston Celtics head coach Joe Mazzulla says the Celtics’ 2024 playoff series against the Indiana Pacers is their toughest battle of the postseason.
“That series against Indiana was by far the toughest, and we swept them, but it should have been over. [to] “Game seven,” Mazzulla said in the interview, which also aired on THE Locked On Celtics podcastBoston won the best-of-seven set 4-0, but the series margins were still slim.
The Celtics won Game 1 by five points, but they had to show late heroics and overtime to do so. Games 3 and 4 were in Indianapolis and both were won by three points by Boston. The Pacers were close in three of the four outings. In fact, outside of Game 2, Indiana was tied or ahead in the final minute of every game in the series.
Yet they didn’t win once. The results will be remembered, but it was a tough series for the Celtics. Mazzulla thinks it was tougher than any of their other three best-of-seven games, against the Miami Heat, Cleveland Cavaliers and Dallas Mavericks.
“We fought, they fought. You have to understand that we have to fight for the things we can control, but there are so many things that happen that we can’t control. We try to get by three times and give [Aaron] “Nesmith has an open 3-pointer. If he makes it and we go to overtime on the road, it’s a completely different game,” Mazzulla told Karalis of the series. The Nesmith shot the Boston head coach is referring to came in Game 3, and it could have changed the series — just like Indiana’s heroics did in the second round against the New York Knicks. “I wrote a list of things and I’m like, ‘Here are all the things that happened that we had no control over.’ And we have to practice that list of things to try to get a little bit more control over. But there’s always things you have to give up in a game,” the head coach added, referring to a few Pacers timeouts and miscues throughout the series.
The Pacers’ uptempo attack, which earned them the highest offensive rating of any team in the playoffs, was hard to counter. It helped them beat the Milwaukee Bucks in the first round and the Knicks in the second round to advance to the Easter Conference Finals for the first time in a decade.
This series didn’t go the way they hoped, but they played better than the results suggest against Boston. Mazzulla agrees. interview in Boston Sports Journal can be read here.
