There’s no precedent in league history for what we saw in the opening days of the NBA’s conference semifinals.
Road teams won all four Game 1s for the first time, then came back to win both Eastern Conference Game 2s as well.
That unlikely outcome was particularly notable because of the dominance the East’s top two teams enjoyed during the regular season. The Cleveland Cavaliers and Boston Celtics each won 60-plus games, an average of 12 more than the lower-seeded Indiana Pacers and New York Knicks.
As the East series take a day off before resuming Friday — Indiana and New York take their 2-0 leads into Games 3 and 4 at home — let’s examine what has gone wrong for the favorites and what that tells us about the chances of Boston and Cleveland coming back to reach an East finals matchup that seemed inevitable a week ago.
Cavs-Pacers, where Spida needs help — fast
Like three of the four Game 1 road wins, Indiana’s triumph was marked by aberrant 3-point shooting. The Pacers went 19-of-36 (53%) beyond the arc, while the Cavaliers — who ranked second in 3-point percentage during the regular season — shot 9-of-38 (24%).
Unlike the others, rust wasn’t really an explanation, as Indiana finished its five-game win over the Milwaukee Bucks a day after Cleveland completed its sweep of the Miami Heat.
The shooting gap did close to a degree in Game 2, when the Pacers shot 39% to the Cavaliers’ 28%. And despite the absence of starter Darius Garland, newly minted Defensive Player of the Year Evan Mobley and key reserve De’Andre Hunter, Cleveland appeared ready to even the series, leading by 17 points late in the third quarter and by seven before things went haywire. The final minute featured a pair of Cavaliers turnovers and two Indiana offensive rebounds off missed free throws to set up Tyrese Haliburton‘s game-winning performance.
But Indiana’s position isn’t as commanding as it might appear. Of the four higher seeds to go down 2-0 at home since 2021, three have fought back to force Game 7 — though two of those, the Celtics in the 2023 conference finals and the Denver Nuggets in last year’s matchup with the Minnesota Timberwolves, lost the series finale at home.
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Donovan Mitchell on Cavs’ loss: This is how the playoffs are
Donovan Mitchell breaks down his emotions and what the Cavaliers need to do in a news conference following their Game 2 defeat to the Pacers.
Naturally, Cleveland’s predicament makes Friday’s Game 3 a must-win, putting the spotlight on the Cavaliers’ injuries. Hunter and Mobley suffered theirs in the fourth quarter of Game 1, while Garland has missed the team’s past four games dating back to the first round.
If Donovan Mitchell dons a cape as he did for the first 47 minutes of Game 2, Cleveland can certainly win without them. But reintroducing Mobley is especially key. Although Indiana cooled inside the arc Tuesday, the team scored 50 points in the paint — six more than Cleveland has allowed in any other playoff game, and 26 in the fourth quarter alone.
Hunter’s absence is ill-timed because he would be the logical replacement for Mobley in the lineup. Without Hunter, the Cavaliers played only two players taller than 6-foot-5, starting center Jarrett Allen and fill-in power forward Dean Wade. That left Cleveland’s second unit undersized.
The Cavaliers have shown the ability to win without Garland, but his return would take some of Mitchell’s offensive load. Per Dan Feldman of the “Dunc’d On Basketball” NBA podcast, Mitchell’s Game 2 performance was just the sixth in Stathead.com’s database with a usage rate of at least half his team’s plays in a playoff game with at least 20 shot attempts. That means every other Cleveland play with Mitchell on the court ended on average with him shooting, turning the ball over or going to the free throw line. (Given that responsibility, it’s no wonder Mitchell wore down late.)
From a matchup standpoint, I don’t think the Pacers’ two opening wins suggest they should be favored over the full-strength Cavaliers on a neutral court.
But Indiana needs to win only two of the next five games, three of which will be at home, and it’s unclear how soon Cleveland will be healthy. As a result, the Pacers are now the clear favorites to return to the East finals.
Celtics-Knicks, where the 3 is failing the champs
As noted, at least the Celtics have experience in this situation, having gone down 3-0 to the Miami Heat in 2023 before rallying to force Game 7 — and then losing at home. In fact, this is the fourth time an Al Horford-era Celtics team has gone down 2-0 at home since it happened to the Celtics against both the Chicago Bulls (a comeback win) and the Cavaliers (a five-game loss as an underdog entering the series) in 2017.
In some ways, that’s unsurprising. Over the past four playoffs, including their loss in the 2022 Finals and last season’s title run, Boston has been dramatically better away from TD Garden. The Celtics are 22-9 (.710) in road playoff games since then, notching at least one road win in all 12 series thus far. No other team is more than three games above .500 on the road in that span.
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Celtics coach breaks down final-minute failures vs. Knicks
Joe Mazzulla explains what went wrong for the Celtics in the final minutes against the New York Knicks in Game 2.
At the same time, Boston is just 23-16 at home over the past four playoffs. Only the Heat (11) have double-digit home losses since then, granting that the Celtics have played far more playoff games than any team in the past four years.
Given that context, Boston losing Game 1 at home to a team it swept 4-0 in a dominant regular-season series seemed little cause for concern. As the Celtics missed a playoff-record 45 3-pointers, the fact that they even forced overtime could be considered impressive.
Defying the typical bounce-back, the poor outside shooting carried over to Game 2. Boston took far fewer 3s (40 out of 94 shots, as compared to 60 of 97 in Game 1) but again made them at a 25% clip. The Celtics are just the second team in the past six years to shoot 25% or worse in the first two games of a playoff series, joining the 2021 Atlanta Hawks in their East finals loss to the Bucks.
To some degree, the focus on Boston’s missed 3s is overstated and reflects the fact that they’re tracked separately in the box score. The Celtics shot even worse (8-of-33, 24%) on 2-point attempts outside the restricted area — without the benefit of the extra point for the shots they did make.
Several of those misses came from Jayson Tatum, who went 0-of-5 on non-paint 2s. Tatum and Jaylen Brown missed all five of the non-paint 2s they attempted in the fourth quarter as Boston resorted to hero ball with New York cutting into its lead. Just eight of the Celtics’ 24 shots in the final period were assist opportunities, per GeniusIQ tracking.
Despite Boston’s reputation for struggling in close games, the Celtics actually had the NBA’s third-best offensive rating in clutch situations this season (score within five points in the last five minutes or in overtime). And Boston’s plus-47 net rating in the clutch during their 2024 title run led all teams.
Because the Celtics are largely healthy — aside from center Kristaps Porzingis‘ ongoing illness — and have controlled the first three quarters of both games with a combined plus-21 differential in that span, they’re in about as good a position as a team down 2-0 at home can possibly be. Amazingly, Boston still has the best odds of winning the East at ESPN BET.
But the defending champs head to New York without momentum and with little margin for error.
