The Boston Celtics dispatched the Dallas Mavericks in five games in the NBA Finals, winning their 18th championship in franchise history. If you ask their star, Jayson Tatum, he knew they were winning the championship as early as the end of the conference semifinals.
"People always ask me, 'When did you guys know you were going to win a championship?'" Tatum said at the Maynard Fine Arts Theatre last Thursday, per The Boston Globe. "When Minnesota beat Denver [in the conference semifinals], 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."
Denver had a hold on Game 7 of the Western Conference Semifinals, up by 20 at the start of the second half, but the Timberwolves stormed back and advanced to the WCF, where they just weren't a great match for the Mavs and Luka Doncic.
No one knows how the Nuggets would've matched up in the WCF against the Mavericks, but Doncic playing against Nikola Jokic would've been must-see TV. They are arguably the two greatest players in the NBA today and have a unique friendship that always bleeds over onto the court.
Tatum went into further detail about when exactly in the final series he knew they were going to win. "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.”
Tatum was correct to be confident against Dallas, as the Mavs just didn't have the offensive firepower to keep up with the star-studded Celtics. Kyrie Irving was contained in all three games in Boston and Dallas couldn't get outside shots to fall, which led them to sign Klay Thompson this offseason.
