Before the Boston Celtics took the court for Game 4 of their East Finals series against the Miami Heat on Monday inside TD Garden, the team learned that its top-rated defender, Marcus Smart, was ruled out with an ankle sprain suffered in Game 3. But the absence of Smart -- who recently secured DPOY honors -- didn't impact the Celtics' ability to apply pressure on the Heat's ballhandlers.
Boston knotted the series at two games apiece by employing terrific defense, and the effort was reflected in the 102-82 score. Miami, bruised and battered, missed its first 14 shots, and its starting lineup combined to score 12 points in the first half, the fewest by a playoff starting lineup since 2011. The Heat didn't make a shot until 3:22 left in the first, and it was the longest drought without a field goal to start any playoff game over the last 25 years, per ESPN Stats.
"We love watching offense in the regular season, and the threes. But of the final four teams remaining, none of them were in the top-nine in the league, offensively. They were all in the top-seven, defensively," Celtics radio voice Sean Grande told The DA Show on Tuesday. "Those offensive teams are all gone. I picked the Milwaukee Bucks at the start of the year to win the East, but they weren't a good defensive team, for the most part, this year...
"People who don't watch the NBA say, 'All you have to do is watch the fourth quarter.' Nope, most games are determined by their first quarter... There's no sport in which the regular season correlates more to the postseason than the NBA does. It almost always plays out that way... The NBA always starts out on the defensive end. It always starts there. That'll give you a pretty good idea of who's going to be left standing, at the end."
Boston, which clinched the East's second seed with a 51-31 record, will play Game 5 against Miami on Wednesday inside FTX Arena (8:30 p.m. ET tipoff). According to FiveThirtyEight, the Celtics currently have a 64-percent chance to reach the NBA Finals and a 54-percent chance to win their first league title since 2008. Both teams met in the 2020 East Finals -- the Heat won, 4-2.
The entire NBA conversation between Grande and DA can be accessed in the audio player above.
You can follow The DA Show on Twitter @DAonCBS and @CBSSportsRadio, and Tom Hanslin @TomHanslin.