Boston — With their dominant play across the NBA, the Celtics will officially end the season with the best record in the league. The C’s moved to 60-16 on the season with their victory over the Thunder on Wednesday. They not only achieved the 60-win plateau, but no other NBA club will win as many games this year.
In their commanding 135-100 victory over a depleted Thunder team, the Celtics broke yet another NBA record. According to Dick Lipe of NBC Sports Boston, the C’s have won by 25 points the most in NBA history—this season, for the 16th time. The Spurs in 2015–16, the Bucks in 1970–71, and the Spurs in 1971–72 each had 15 such victories, but the Celtics defeated them all.
Regarding the NBA-best record, C’s coach Joe Mazzulla remarked, “Celebrating as much as bring it in, shaking everyone’s hand, and saying don’t take it for granted.” Indeed, we did celebrate it. It’s crucial, in my opinion, to not take it for granted. I believe it’s critical to express gratitude for that. Doing that is really difficult. You shouldn’t take this for granted because it could not come along again. We undoubtedly discussed it as a group.
The Thunder were now without Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Jalen Williams, their top two scorers. Nevertheless, the Celtics handled business on Wednesday. When the opponent wasn’t playing at full strength in a couple games, the Cs let their play fall, and it hurt them occasionally.
However, Mazzulla discussed treating Wednesday like a “clinching game” in the locker room.
Over the next 1.5 weeks, the Celtics have six games left in the regular season. However, they won’t really have anything to compete for because they can adjust lineups and styles instead. Before attempting what they hope will be a deep postseason run, they’ll also make sure to maintain all of their rotation players healthy.
We have to find for each of these games, as we’re heading toward the end of the season, some sort of motivation,” Kristaps Porzingis said. “And tonight was a night where it was like, if we win this game, we could achieve something. Joe just kind of poked us a little bit and got us going for the game, knowing that we could clinch it — and we went out there and took care of business.”