Mavericks Believe Celtics Were ‘Ready To Celebrate’ In Game 4

The Boston Celtics are about to endure an extremely uncomfortable plane ride, as they'll have to find a way to bounce back from a historic loss in Game 4 of the NBA Finals.

It wasn't supposed to be that way, though.

The C's had an opportunity to close out the Dallas Mavericks, but got absolutely buried in a blowout loss at American Airlines Center. It's not the end of the world, but there was at least some part of Boston that believed it would be riding back home with the Larry O'Brien Trophy, right?

It's what the Mavs think, at least.

"It's real simple. We don't have to complicate this. This isn't surgery -- our group was ready to go," Mavericks head coach Jason Kidd said, per league-provided video. "They were ready to celebrate. We made a stand. We were desperate. We got to continue to keep playing that way; understand they're trying to find a way to close the door.

"The hardest thing in this league is to close the door when you have a group that has nothing to lose. (In Game 4) you saw that. They let go of the rope pretty early."

Kidd likely isn't wrong in his assessment.

The Celtics, for as much as they'd like for you to believe they're robots, are just as susceptible to looking ahead as anyone else. It's true that they shot poorly from distance, but the reason the scoreboard looked the way it did was because they lacked effort and execution. The Mavericks dominated the glass and forced some uncharacteristically sloppy turnovers out of the likes of Jrue Holiday and Payton Pritchard.

Boston was not locked in to the same level it was in the first three games of the series, whether they'd admit it or not.