The Bill Simmons Podcast
A Celtics-OKC Panic Check, Plus the Towns/Porzingis Careers With Zach Lowe
Tue, 06 May 2025
The Ringer’s Bill Simmons is joined by Zach Lowe to react to the Knicks-Celtics and Nuggets-OKC playoff games on Monday (2:53). Then, Bill and Zach discuss the careers of Karl Anthony-Towns and Kristaps Porzingis (49:39). Host: Bill Simmons Guest: Zach Lowe Producers: Chia Hao Tat and Eduardo Ocampo This episode is brought to you by Degree Deodorant. Grab the original Cool Rush at Walmart or Target today. The Ringer is committed to responsible gaming. Please visit www.rg-help.com to learn more about the resources and helplines available. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: Are the Celtics and OKC in trouble after Game 1?
I want to talk about the Celtics first, but which team should be more panicked right now? Celtics or OKC, in your opinion?
I don't think either. OK, let's be clear. I don't think either should be panicked. I'm going to say Celtics should be a little more worried only because the Hauser injury, he turned his ankle or whatever, and he's been a zero so far in the playoffs. And the Porzingis weirdness just keeps right on rolling. This has been a strange season. He didn't play the second half. He has an illness again.
And so you take those two guys and put question marks beside them for game two and you're just sort of running low on guys. So I don't think either should be all that worried. But I guess I'll inflict you with a little more panic and say the Celtics.
So the case for the Celtics is what you laid out, specifically the Porzingis piece. Because you go into this series and you go, all right, am I getting a healthy or a relatively healthy Porzingis? I know I'm getting a healthy Sam Houser. Well, he gets hurt. And then what am I getting from Jalen? Where is he? And then also, how much am I getting from Drew? Because Drew had this hamstring.
Well, Drew actually looked, I thought, really good. He seems healthy. Porzingis looked terrible in the first quarter, like alarming, like texting people, like, what's going on with Porzingis? Then we never see him again. And he has this mystery illness that I've never gotten a real answer for what it is. And then they lose Hauser too. So all of a sudden now you're basically down to six guys.
The counter would be, they got every shot they wanted for, 45 minutes, basically, right? They missed a record amount of threes. Nobody has ever missed 41 threes in a playoff game. They missed 45. There was some crazy stats this morning about how open those threes were, how lost towns looked on the defensive rotations. So I'm sure Missoula is like, look, we just, this is going to happen sometimes.
We're going to miss shots. We can't panic. Don't change who we are. With that said, I hated the last couple of Tatum shots in regulation. To me, that's the worst of the Celtics. When they're just settling, they're playing with their food, they're letting the shot clock go down, and they're not attacking a team that just doesn't have rim protection.
And there's specifically that last possession with, what, 20 seconds left. Tatum's diddling around the top. He gets Robinson on him.
Diddling! Diddling!
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Chapter 2: What went wrong for the Celtics against the Knicks?
I feel like that wasn't him, and I don't remember who it was. But that's the year that Jada McDaniels punched a wall and Nas Reed was hurt, and they were kind of a mash unit. Yeah.
Well, I'll tell you this. I probably gave up on him as somebody who could be part of a possible finals team two years ago after that five-game Denver series. And then last year... clearly there was more there.
And the fact that Edwards was so high on him and, and really seems invested in building him up and trying to turn him into somebody special and a, and a running mate like that, that, that wasn't nothing. I do think that Nick's traded for him partly because they didn't have a center and they had this window after the bridges trade.
And they had no idea when Robinson was coming back and they had no idea if Randall could play with those two wings. And it was a little bit of a fuck it trade combined with, we know this guy cause he's, Wes was with them in Kentucky. It was a little bit of a roll of the dice. I think it's turned out about as well as you could have guessed.
For what their options were in September, not knowing if Mitchell Robinson was even going to play 40 games and who else was out there, we just saw Phoenix got completely submarine by the fact that it's hard to find a center, among many other reasons. I think the trade was a success. I still wonder... Is there another level for him or is this it? It feels like this is it. Year 10.
I don't like, do you see him becoming all of a sudden the most imposing guy in the Celtics series? I don't. I think we are where we are.
Yeah, I don't, you know, I mean, defensively, I don't think much of a leap is ever going to come. I think he just is what he is defensively, which is a liability on the pick and roll and someone that you've got to kind of scheme around. Offensively, it just sort of like if the team context were ever perfect around him,
I could see him becoming like a, like a, oh my God, what am I supposed to do here? Kind of force, but it just.
Yeah. So what kind of team is that?
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