Tuesday was perhaps the best night of the season so far for Celtics skeptics. A 22-point fourth quarter lead disappeared in less than nine minutes. That stretch was something of a greatest hits album of blown Celtics leads. They settled for jumpers. They didn't adjust to an opposing role player, in this case Dean Wade, suddenly getting hotter than the surface of the sun. Jaylen Brown was nowhere to be seen. When critics pick against the 48-13 Celtics as championship favorites, they point to stretches like this. Nine of those 13 losses have come in NBA-defined "clutch" situations.
One of those losses came against the defending champion Denver Nuggets in yet another game that more or less followed the expected script. Boston led most of the way. Denver closed the gap in the second half. Boston found itself ahead 98-95 with a bit less than five minutes to play. Nikola Jokic out-executed them the rest of the way as the Nuggets went on a 7-2 run to steal the victory. As close as the game was, Denver doesn't generate those same late-game doubts. Winning a championship inspires such confidence. NBA history tells us that once you've won the first, you're usually in pretty good shape to win the second, and potentially more. This is a league defined by dynasties.
The books don't agree. Not only is Boston the championship favorite over Denver at the moment, their odds aren't all that close. At FanDuel, for instance, Boston's +210 odds to win it all are half of Denver's +420 line. This is more or less in line with what we've seen over the past few years. The Celtics have been favored in their last seven playoff series, and while their odds have fluctuated, they've spent the better part of the past two calendar years as championship favorites or something relatively close. Vegas loves the Celtics. They've been largely indifferent towards the Nuggets. The Phoenix Suns were favored over the Nuggets in the second round a season ago despite Denver having the Western Conference's No. 1 seed. They were only a -160 favorite over the play-in Lakers in the conference finals.
So what's going on here? Why does a sturdy defending champion like Denver keep coming up behind Boston at the sportsbooks? Here are three reasons as they prepare for their second showdown of the season (Thursday night at 10 p.m. ET).
1. All of the numbers favor Boston
Remember those nine clutch losses we mentioned for Boston? Well, Denver has 11. Their records (20-11 vs. 18-9) and net ratings (+23.1 for Denver and +20 for Boston) in clutch situations are relatively similar. All of this is meant to say that what our eyes are showing us with Boston and what the numbers suggest is closer to object truth are very different. Vegas almost always favors the numbers, and Boston is a statistical juggernaut.
Boston ranks No. 1 in offense and No. 2 in defense as of this writing. Only two other 21st century teams ranked first on one end and second on the other: the 2015 and 2017 Warriors. Prior to Tuesday's loss to Cleveland, Boston was in the middle of maybe the best 11-game stretch of regular-season basketball in NBA history. Their point-differential across that 11-game winning streak was a record 243 total points. They are currently outscoring opponents by 11.3 points per 100 possessions. Only the 2017 Warriors, 1996 Bulls and 1997 Bulls have ever been better.
Those teams got more credit than the Celtics do. Considering they represent the only two cores in NBA history to win 70 or more games in a season, that might be warranted. But statistically speaking, the Celtics aren't just a great team. They're a historic one. We might not see that now because the Celtics haven't won a championship, and therefore lack the cache of established champions. But hindsight tends to make such titles feel inevitable.
The 2015 Warriors are an interesting analogue. By any statistical measure, they were a historically dominant team. They are now regarded as such because we've seen what Stephen Curry, Draymond Green and Klay Thompson have gone on to do. But nothing about them felt inevitable at the time. The Cleveland Cavaliers even entered the 2015 postseason with identical championship odds despite winning 14 fewer regular-season games. Perhaps one day, when Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown have racked up a few rings, we'll look back on a 2024 Celtics championship as the statistical inevitability that the numbers are telling us it should be now. That's just not credit that most fans are willing to give teams before they've actually won it all. Vegas doesn't operate on those sentiments. If the numbers say that Boston is the best team in the NBA, their odds are going to reflect that.
2. Boston has unique advantages against Denver
There is no such thing as a good matchup for Denver's offense. Boston comes about as close as anyone reasonably could. Al Horford is among the NBA's best post defenders. He so vexes Joel Embiid that Philadelphia once gave him an eight-figure contract in part to ensure he wouldn't be able to play against them (a plan that spectacularly backfired). Across 15 matchups, Jokic has averaged just 21.2 points and 7.3 assists against Horford. That encompasses his entire career, of course, and the recent numbers have been better, but again, we're talking about Nikola Jokic here. You won't shut him down. All you can really hope for is pretty good.
Boston's shooting presents issues for Denver on the other end. Jokic is hardly a stationary rim-protector. He likes defending at the level of the screen and Denver rotates well behind him. But the Celtics have a true five-out offense, and that has trickle-down effects. Denver is already a middle-of-the-pack defensive rebounding team. Put Jokic on Kristaps Porzingis and he's spending large chunks of the game defending behind the arc. Put anyone else on Porzingis and the Celtics have shown they aren't afraid to mismatch hunt.
Denver can do that too, but finding mismatches on Boston's defense has never been easy. Jamal Murray likely wouldn't spend a single minute without either Jrue Holiday or Derrick White as his primary defender. Holiday is an especially notable matchup here because he defends bigger players so well, giving him at least a puncher's chance of switching onto Jokic in their two-man game and surviving long enough for Boston to make whatever rotations it needs to make in order to salvage the possession. There's not a bad defensive player in their rotation. If nothing else, Murray and Jokic can't torture any weak links like they do against other opponents.
These advantages are hardly guarantees, but they're rare in the context of Denver, specifically. How many elite teams have high-end post defenders in 2024? How many opponents can comfortably switch across five positions? Boston is a rarity in that respect. They have more size, shooting and versatility that any other team Denver will face. But speaking of the teams in Denver's way...
3. Two decades of Western dominance
As of this writing, the No. 4 seed in the Eastern Conference is the Orlando Magic and the No. 4 seed in the Western Conference are the Los Angeles Clippers. Be honest, who scares you more in a playoff series, Kawhi Leonard or Paolo Banchero?
That might sound like an oversimplification, but really consider the gauntlet Denver might have to face to escape the West. The play-in round would currently include two recent champions featuring all-time legends (the Lakers and Warriors) and another team that features an MVP candidate (the Mavericks). Those are the teams that might not even make it into the dance. Denver's first-round matchup right now? The Phoenix Suns, who have blown the doors off of their opponents on the rare occasions in which Kevin Durant, Devin Booker and Bradley Beal have all been healthy at the same time. Again, these are the sort of opponents waiting for Denver right away, not in the conference finals.
Boston's path won't exactly be easy, but it's nothing compared to what awaits Denver. Philadelphia may or may not have Joel Embiid. The Knicks are currently playing without four starters. The Bucks hired their coach in January. The Heat remain a terrifying spoiler as usual, and Cleveland just showed Boston how scary it can be, but the conference as a whole has only a single juggernaut.
You can't win the Finals if you don't reach the Finals. Even if Denver and Boston were considered completely even by the books, it would be irresponsible not to favor Boston based on the ease of their path alone. Throw in the home-court advantage they'll have over every team in the field and these odds suddenly make sense. The eye-test may scream Denver, but when you lay all of the factors out, it's not hard to see why Vegas prefers Boston.
