A huge ray of hope
Olynyk’s performance is what Celts need
A couple of hours before showtime last night at the Garden, Celtics coach Brad Stevens channeled his inner Bill Belichick during a chat with the media.
“I think the person who certainly says it all the time around here that we talk about is Belichick, with the idea of doing your job and staying in the moment and focusing on the task at hand,” said Stevens. Do your job? Stay in the moment? Focus on the task at hand?
Stevens was talking about Kelly Olynyk, right?
Later in the evening, much later, after the Celtics completed their 115-105 Game 7 victory over the Washington Wizards, and after Olynyk submitted the latest, biggest game of his young life by scoring 26 points, the ever-diplomatic Papa Stevens basically said he loves all his children.
“I thought the whole team (responded to the message),” he said. “But, yes, I thought Kelly . . .” Pause. “But everybody else that played did that too.”
And that’s fine. Spread the love around. But if ever there was a Celtic who provided a textbook example of “focusing on the task at hand,” it was Kelly Olynyk, Game 7, TD Garden, May 15, 2017.
It’s not that he told the rest of the Celtics to climb on his back and allow him to carry them all to way to the conference finals, because that’s not who Olynyk is and it’s not what he does.
Let’s not go nuts here. He’s not Larry Bird. And he’s not Kevin McHale, either, except that last night he was McHale-like, a big guy off the bench who provided much-needed late-inthe-game scoring punch. Of those 26 points, a whopping 14 of ’em were in the fourth quarter, at a time when the desperate Wizards were busy trying not to let Isaiah Thomas beat them.
So Olynyk beat them. Like a drum he beat them.
Such was Olynyk’s fourth-quarter panache that a “Kelly! Kelly! Kelly!” chant began roaring through the Garden, something I doubt any pundit included in his or her preseries prognostications.
Did Olynyk hear those chants?
“Yeah, I did hear that, in between the MVP chants for Isaiah,” he said.
Except Thomas wasn’t buying it.
“Kelly was MVP tonight,” he said. “He made 3-pointers, he took it to the hole, he played really tough. He’s a big reason why we won tonight.”
Sitting next to Thomas during the postgame presser, Olynyk said, “They were putting a lot of attention on him. And he was putting us in great spots, and we’re playing 4-on-3. If they don’t want to run at you, or if they try to run at you too hard, you gotta be able to make a basketball play out there, and that’s what they did. They weren’t going to let (Thomas) make plays at the end. They were going to make other people do it, so someone had to do it.”
That someone being Kelly Olynyk.
Interestingly, Olynyk was asked if, before the Celtics took the court, he sensed he was going to have a big game. He didn’t come right out and say: yes. Instead, he skipped right past the obvious, saying, “I mean, we needed it. That’s a tough team that we played, seven tough games. We needed to help out the starters, help out Isaiah.”
It’s important to note that, with the exception of their friends and family members, nobody outside the Celtics locker room thinks these guys have any chance to defeat the Cleveland Cavaliers in the upcoming Eastern Conference finals. Thomas went so far as to drag out the old line about how “they didn’t give us a chance in this series,” which isn’t true at all, except that, well, whatever.
But Thomas is right about the next series: Nobody is giving the Celtics a chance. They just don’t have the stars. But if second-tier players such as Olynyk can emerge out of nowhere to score 26 points off the bench . . . those are the kind of surprises that lead to upsets.
If it’s hope you’re looking for — and, again, it’s gonna take a whole lot of hope to beat the Cavs — then Kelly Olynyk supplied some last night on Causeway Street.