Josh Hart on the Celtics: ‘they’re a heck of a team’

You can almost never trust the narrator.

Regardless if they were former players, coaches, or executives, TV pundits are almost always the least reliable. Current head coaches are part cheerleader, part manipulator, part motivational speaker. Players can vacillate between self-promoters and sports sound bite AI. Us writers, well, I’m admittedly a fan first and an NBA scribe.

No, for the hard truth, the best source might be the opposing team, especially after the 118-105 beatdown Boston put on New York on Sunday, and the domination they’ve had over them all year.

After a 23-point drubbing on Opening Night followed by another embarrassing showing at Madison Square Garden after the trade deadline and then yesterday’s shellacking, Josh Hart put it simply, “they’re a heck of a team.”

He expounded. “We’re not trying to close a gap with the Boston Celtics. They’re the champs for a reason,” Hart said after tallying a near triple double in his return from injury. “They’ve got All-NBA guys. They’ve got All-Stars. Heck of a team. We’re not trying to close a gap on them; we’re trying to make sure we get ourselves where we need to be at the end of the year. Right now, we’re not there.”

And while it hasn’t always been smooth sailing this season, the Celtics have certainly got their groove back, winning nine of their last ten. But the league — especially in the playoffs — is all about matchups and for Boston, they’ve been able to hold at bay the one team that (gulp) critics and experts alike pegged as the most likely team to knock them off their throne. With a stable of wing defenders surrounding the offensive engine of Jalen Brunson and Karl-Anthony Towns, they were media-appointed Celtics killers. Let’s let one of those would-be conspirators speak.

“It’s tough. They’ve got three level scorers at every single position. They’ve got the length defensively to make us take tough shots offensively,” Hart said after his team went down 38-19 early. “In the first quarter, they had about three layups and the Sam Hauser three in transition and that really killed us and that was from our bad offense.”

Two-thirds into their regular season, Towns said the Knicks were still “a work in progress” and to his credit, wouldn’t accept trimming a 27-point deficit to four early in the fourth and allowing it to balloon back to 21 as a moral victory. Brunson was less politically correct with his remarks: “I keep saying all this $#!&, but we got to go out there and do it. It’s as simple as that.”

“Tatum is probably going to be First Team All-NBA, Jaylen Brown probably Second Team. Porzingis, White, Jrue. Pritchard, probably Sixth Man [of the Year],” Hart continued. “They got everything. They’re a heck of a team, well-coached team, disciplined team. We gotta step it up.”

No truer words have been spoken.