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…
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