Zach Lowe

And free throw rate is a big reason.

A potent free throw rate is a big reason.

The Celtics defense takes a hit in the Jalen Brown on off minutes.

Something interesting is going on there, but I'm not going to penalize him for the fact that the Celtics are deep and awesome and competitive and stagger their rotations so that, you know, two of their best players are on the floor almost all the time.

I'm not going to penalize him for that.

Ants on off numbers.

Aren't super impressive by this metric.

Anyway, Donovan Mitchell's are, have been, I just think at this point, given the minutes advantage he has given the way he's finishing the season, I think he deserves it.

And I think the minutes, the minutes matter.

Um, the fact that he's played more games and Kawhi still has to finish.

I think Kawhi has to play every game to just hit the seat.

Maybe you can miss one more.

Uh, I can't remember that that matters too.

Um,

And the other thing that happened last night in that Miami win is that the Celtics are almost locked into number two.

They're like an 80 to 90 percent lock on number two, which makes the race for the three seed interesting, which puts them on the opposite side of the bracket from the Pistons, who just shout out to the Pistons.

They're really, really good.

I said last week that if you divided up the sort of pie over who would win the East, I would have the Celtics first and the Knicks second.

We're going to talk about the Knicks because, my God, just every fucking day is a saga with the Knicks.

But that all the pie slices, to use group chat terminology, were like fairly close to 25% among the top four teams, like plus or minus 3%, 4% here.