The Boston Celtics control their own destiny heading into the final eight-game stretch of the season after beating the Jazz 125-97 on Wednesday to complete a 4-0 road Western Conference road trip. The Celtics are just 1.5 games behind the Heat for the number one seed in the Eastern Conference.
“That’s crazy, right?” Jaylen Brown said about the Celtics’ rise up the Eastern Conference standings. “Not really. I feel like all of this was prime, very, very prime for us. We just had to put full stretches together and stuff like that.
“I knew the energy was about to shift, so I’m happy that we’re here now. It’s crazy to know we’re a game and a half — as many games as we blew in the first half of the season, it would’ve been nice to have won some of those games because maybe we would be in first right now. But everything happens for a reason, so we take it one game at a time. We see where we’re at come playoff time.”
The Heat and Celtics play one more this season, and the Celtics will also be playing the Bucks once more. The Celtics’ shift to winning time came after the return of Marcus Smart from injury and COVID-19, helping the Celtics to win four of their last five games in January. The winning spurt inspired Jaylen Brown to tweet something interesting about his team.
The energy is about to shift
— Jaylen Brown (@FCHWPO) January 31, 2022
According to Boston.com, the tweet was never about basketball but about Mercury being in retrograde. If you follow astrology, you know Mercury retrograde causes confusion and frustration, which can be an apt way to describe how the Celtics season went at the beginning of the year. Mercury retrogrades three times per year and happens when the plane travels backward across the sky.
“The retrograde was coming to an end, so that’s why I tweeted the energy was about to shift,” Brown said. “So it happens that when retrograde ended, that’s when we started going on this crazy win streak. But it’s all connected.”
The next retrograde is May 10-June 2, the same time Boston hopes to be still making a playoff run to the Conference Finals and beyond.
