With a month to go in the regular season, the Boston Celtics will host the Oklahoma City Thunder in a marquee matchup Wednesday between the league’s top two title favorites. While neither team will be at full strength (OKC’s Jalen Williams is out with a hip strain, Boston’s Kristaps Porziņģis is doubtful with an illness), this could be a preview of the NBA Finals.
How do the heavyweights match up? What obstacles stand in their way? And who would win if they met on the NBA’s biggest stage? Our writers weigh in.
What intrigues you about a potential Celtics-Thunder Finals?
Vincent Goodwill: Styles make fights, and although they have similar personnel, these teams don’t play the same way. Would Jaylen Brown guard Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and hound him the way he did Luka Dončić? Would Lu Dort be all over Jayson Tatum? Chet Holmgren and Kristaps Porziņģis in a battle of skinny vs. formerly skinny? The league has become a battle of wings and usually whoever wins the Finals takes the mantle of the supreme style and build for everyone else to follow.
Tom Haberstroh: Experience. The Celtics have eight players who have played in multiple NBA Finals; the Thunder have zero. Inexperienced teams have won titles before (see the ‘23 Denver Nuggets), but these Thunder are greener than the Celtics’ away jerseys. The only Thunder player to have ever played in an NBA Finals is Alex Caruso, who will be making his first postseason appearance with the Thunder, so he’s not exactly a tenured elder statesman. I don’t think experience would entirely determine the fate of this matchup, but it’s going to be on my mind anytime either team hits a spell of adversity.
Dan Devine: Broadly: Whether Oklahoma City’s remix of the Boston build — the ability to toggle between 5-out/drive-and-kick and double-big looks that still have plenty of offensive juice, great positional size across the perimeter, two All-Star-level big wing creators, ace defenders at damn near every position — is good enough to beat the genuine article.
More specifically: How will the Celtics guard Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, and how will OKC react to it? We saw the Thunder run aground in the second round last season when Dallas packed the paint to neuter the drive-and-kick and worked to force the ball out of SGA’s hands; he still got his 32 a night, but his teammates shot a combined 42.3% from the floor and 31.1% from 3-point range in a six-game loss. On Monday, the Nuggets brought aggressive doubles and traps aimed at turning SGA into a passer; both Luguentz Dort and Isaiah Hartenstein finished with more shots attempts than Shai, which just about any defense is probably going to consider a win.
Would Jalen Williams (who’ll miss Wednesday’s matchup with a hip strain) be up to the task of making Boston pay for loading up on Shai? Can Chet Holmgren (shooting just 29% from 3 since returning from his hip fracture) seize that opportunity? If not, does a Thunder team that ranks just behind Boston in offensive efficiency this season have enough firepower to beat the C’s four times?
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Morten Stig Jensen: The game-to-game adjustments, as both teams have so many varying instruments they can play. The Celtics, despite common conception, aren’t just a 3-point shooting team. It’s their biggest weapon, yes, but both Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown can create in isolation, and they can play through the post when Kristaps Porziņģis is healthy.
The Thunder, while not a dynamic outside shooting team, do have plenty of role players who can get in on the action from long range, and even SGA has begun embracing the long ball as a complement to his elite slashing game, predicated on acceleration and deceleration. With Chet Holmgren and Isaiah Hartenstein also in place, the Thunder can play very post-centric, too. From a schematic perspective, Thunder-Celtics would be enormously fun.
What’s the biggest obstacle in Boston’s path to the Finals?
Devine: I hope you won’t find it insufficiently clever for me to say “the team that’s 55-10 with an eight-game lead over Boston, that has a top-10 defense and one of the five best offenses of the last 50-plus years, and that split a four-game season series with the Celtics.” I’ve been saying it for months: The Cavaliers really are that good. I believe Boston can beat them, because I believe Boston can beat anybody. But I also believe that this year’s iteration of the Cavs is going to be a much tougher out than its predecessors and represents the highest hurdle for the C’s to leap between now and June.
Goodwill: You wonder if the Celtics’ age will make them more ripe for competition this time around. They weren’t challenged at all last spring. And it’s funny what a difference a year makes. Al Horford, Jrue Holiday and Kristaps Porziņģis are veteran pieces you may wonder about in a playoff run. Do they have the stamina to stay effective for four rounds? Of course, Dan’s point about Cleveland being really good matters, especially with home-court advantage. And Cleveland isn’t old where it matters positionally. All the pieces, and all the ages, matter.
Jensen: The easy answer is the Cleveland Cavaliers. That’s also the complicated answer, because getting past them won’t be a walk in the park. Head coach Joe Mazzulla will need to dig deep in his bag of tricks to drag the Celtics through a best-of-seven series against one of the best two-way forces in the league. The Cavs, not unlike the Thunder, can play many different ways, as they field elite perimeter playmaking and elite interior defense. The key to it all will be the play of Evan Mobley, who seems to be the offensive X-factor for these Cavs. If he gets it going concurrently with Donovan Mitchell and Darius Garland, Boston’s defense will have to stretch its limits significantly.
Haberstroh: Cleveland. This team is having the best regular season in Cavs history. Kenny Atkinson has them playing like juggernauts on both ends of the floor. I’d pick Cavs in seven with home-court advantage being the diff.
What’s the biggest obstacle in OKC’s path to the Finals?
Jensen: Dare I be simplistic and say the best player in all of basketball might present the biggest obstacle to the Thunder? Nikola Jokić is currently playing the best basketball of his career, by his own admission, and it’s reflected in the numbers — 29/13/10 is outrageous, especially when you factor in that the Serbian is also hitting nearly 58% of his shot attempts.
Also worrying for the Thunder is Jamal Murray is finally returning to the state of which he used to play (23.2 points over the last 40 games), and MIP-candidate Christian Braun is seemingly locking in his starting spot over the next decade. The Nuggets are good, but given their poor start to the season, it seems not everyone has caught up to that fact.
Haberstroh: The Golden State Warriors. With Jimmy Butler in the fold, the Warriors don’t turn the ball over nearly as much as they did before. The Thunder’s defense preys on mistake-prone teams like the pre-Butler Warriors, but GM Mike Dunleavy did well to sharpen their attack. The Finals-tested Dubs have the confidence and skills to dethrone the Thunder, but it’ll take a perfect performance from aging vets to rattle the peerlessly disciplined Thunder.
Goodwill: The fat man in Denver (we say fat with affection here) because nobody has a matchup for him. But could the Lakers or even Warriors provide the challenge? Not that either would be favored to knock off the Thunder, but could the collective body blows do the trick? In the East, it feels like a collision course between two teams. In the West, it feels like an ATV ride through muddy and choppy terrain for everybody. A refreshed Steph and Jimmy? Don’t want to see them. A healthier LeBron and rounding-into-health Luka? Nah, I’d rather someone else knock them off.
Devine: Sometimes the simplest answer is the best one: Nikola friggin’ Jokić. I don’t think it’s recency bias to say that a Nuggets team that’s been championship-caliber whenever it’s had both Jokić and Jamal Murray healthy — and that just flambéed OKC’s league-best defense to the tune of 1.42 points per possession on the second night of a back-to-back — is a threat worth taking seriously. (Ditto for the new-look, Jimmy Butler-infused Warriors. And If LeBron James’ groin heals up, a Lakers team that can use him and Luka Dončić to create mismatches on offense and switch everything on defense could be pretty dangerous, too.)
Celtics-Thunder Finals: Who wins?
Haberstroh: Thunder. I’m trusting OKC’s record-setting point differential of +12.6 every 100 possessions. By acquiring Isaiah Hartenstein and Alex Caruso this offseason, they filled in two of their biggest weaknesses: rebounding and experience. Unlike most teams, the Thunder boast the same lineup flexibility as the Celtics and I’m worried about Kristaps Porziņģis’ health (and not just the mysterious viral infection). The Thunder are vulnerable to Boston getting hot from downtown just like the Mavs were last playoffs, but you can say that for every team facing the Celtics.
Devine: Thunder. I took OKC over Boston in our preseason roundtable; I am nothing if not a man of deep, abiding principle, so I will stick with it. (The fact that the Thunder have literally been one of the most dominant regular-season teams we’ve ever seen doesn’t exactly hurt here.)
Jensen: Thunder. We’ve heard the cries of inexperience, but eventually teams figure that out and move on to another level. OKC seems to be hitting that stride. The collective confidence level is sky-high, the team is deep as heck, and we can hardly use last season’s playoff disappointment as anything given that the team replaced Josh Giddey, whom Mark Daigneault couldn’t keep on the floor, with Hartenstein and Alex Caruso. Boston will put up a fight, especially if healthy. And as tiring as it sounds, given that this narrative has certainly played out, perhaps a Thunder matchup in the Finals will be the exact setting for Tatum to raise his game and lean into his vast scoring skills.
Goodwill: Celtics. Someone has to repeat, right? It’s been so long and it’s good to have continuity, historically with this stuff. Have the Thunder suffered enough? One playoff heartbreak in the second round last year is the only bruise on that body. Do they know how precious these trips are? You wonder if this is a last dance for Boston’s group en masse with aprons and tax implications. So if that’s the case, they have experience and urgency and two supreme players to match up with OKC’s firm of SGA and Williams. Gimme the ornery Celtics if they make it that far.
