RELIEF AND JOY FOR THE CELTICS IF THEY WIN BANNER 18 — HELL IF THEY LOSE

Another NBA championship should be convenient in Boston, against Indiana and the Minnesota-Dallas survivor, unless Joe Mazzulla once again isn’t prepared to coach a masterfully constructed team

     You might ask why the coach of the Boston Celtics, who really should stop trying if they don’t win Banner 18, brought home a dog. Seems the Rottweiler is misconstrued, much like Joe Mazzulla. “That’s one of the reasons I fell in love with the Rottweiler,” he said. “They’re so misunderstood from the standpoint of how they are viewed by people and how they really are, especially toward the people that they love.”

     Make what you want of the story, but Mazzulla either will be toasted by an armada of duck boats or will be canned as Dan Hurley is summoned in Storrs. There is no middle ground, when the Celtics are heavy favorites over the Indiana Pacers and don’t care if Anthony Edwards scores 63 in the TD Garden in the NBA Finals. As Pacers coach Rick Carlisle described his team as “the uninvited guest” in the Eastern Conference finals, the same can be said for Minnesota and Dallas in the West. How notable of Draymond Green, who still hears boos in his deep sleep from New England catcallers, to point out on his offseason podcast what must happen on Causeway Street.

     “They have Jaylen Brown making $300-plus million, with soon-to-be Jayson Tatum making the same. It’s a failure. A Finals appearance ain’t good enough,” he said. “You’ve got to win it all. It’s time to win, and it’s time now.”

     If not Green, it was Steph Curry, who said this of the Celtics after a 140-88 drubbing weeks ago: “That’s what we used to do to teams. It’s kind of demoralizing.” So against three teams that weren’t supposed to reach late May, a mere demoralization won’t be enough. They must cause someone’s immediate death, crack them, continue with 4-1 series routs — if not sweeps — en route to a championship that would break their first-place tie with the Los Angeles Lakers.

     Still installed as head coach is Mazzulla, who was roasted last season for missing timeouts and poor playcalling late in games. He was installed when Ime Udoka, who took the Celtics to the 2022 Finals, decided to have an inter-office affair and turned a long suspension into a new job in Houston. Mazzulla was yanked from his assistantship and has gone 121-43 in the regular season, but a playoff loss to Miami doomed him. He cannot fail this time. Brown is ravenous and demands a title. Tatum drives people crazy but remains one of the league’s top talents. Jrue Holiday and Derrick White and Kristaps Porzingis, when he’s healthy … this could be an all-time collection.

     If Mazzulla makes it happen, that is. The Rottweiler is known as Nike. Both deal with moods, most disturbing in the locker room, where Brown and Tatum continue to have moments that might disturb the cause. The coach is watching, especially after rare losses to Cleveland and Miami in the opening rounds. “Everyone says they want to win,” he said. “Until it’s time to do s— you don’t want to do.” A city of sports fiends loses minds, until the Celtics return to close out. The Pacers? They have Tyrese Haliburton, who was unreliable before nailing three-pointers and yapping at New York players and fans in Game 7, when he and his teammates shot 67.1 percent — the highest field-goal percentage in playoff history. They have a champion in Pascal Siakam and a master in T.J. McConnell. All of which was enough to bury the Knicks, who introduced Jalen Brunson to the world and saw Tom Thibodeau lose before the conference finals for the 11th straight season.

     Was the year a success? “No,” said Brunson, who suffered a broken hand. “Did we win the championship? Did we get close? So, no. That’s my mindset.”

     Losing three games to the Knicks means the Pacers should be hammered by the Celtics. “An epic failure if they don’t win the championship,” said Stephen A. Smith, still mourning New York’s failure on ESPN. How are the Celtics better than last postseason, when Playoff Jimmy Butler romped?

     “I think that’s the real answer to what everybody asked all year, about, ‘Oh, what’s the difference between this year and last year?’ The difference is we’ve had time and experiences to pull from, and we’ve had time to talk about those,” Mazzulla said. “We’ve had time to talk about our daily process. We’ve had time to talk about handling past situations, through the offseason and the season. We’ve had time to build a relationship together, to have open and honest communication — the words that you use end up reflecting the type of group that you have and how we handle successes and failures.”

     Meaning? “The one thing this team has done a good job of this season is not playing with any expectations,” Mazzulla said. “If you’re winning by a lot, or if you’re losing by a lot, it doesn’t really matter. At the end of the day, it takes what it takes and you gotta be present. The team has done a good job fighting for that. I think it’s important, managing our own expectations.”

     That isn’t easy when Brown speaks of big losses and Tatum is more on the chill side. “It’s easy to keep (the success) in perspective when you’ve lost all six times,” Brown said. “Yeah, it’s a blessing, but what keeps it in perspective is that I haven’t gotten over that hump — one time in the Finals. So that keeps everything in perspective right there.”

     Said Tatum: “That’s the narrative that you might see on TV, the idea that we have a superteam. It’s two-fold, right? We didn’t have the Coach of the Year. We didn’t have the MVP. We only had two All-Stars. So, they say we’re a superteam, but we didn’t get rewarded like we are. But we know we’ve got a good team. We’re not perfect. We play the right way more often than not, and we know we’ve got to be better.”

     The veteran, Al Horford, thinks Mazzulla understands the mixture. “Joe has been key for our success,” he said. “He has put us in positions defensively, but also offensively, for us to continue to grow as players. There are a lot of ways teams try to play us, and I feel like he’s been great tactically with our group. Making us see things, making us think about them and us being able to process so much information. J.T. and J.B., I feel like, have been great with that, because it’s a lot that gets thrown at them, and different things that they have to navigate. Joe has been really good with that and just as a leader of our group. We follow him. He demands a lot from us and we’re right there plugging away. We know we still have a ways to go.”

     Holiday just likes to have fun. “He’s crazy. Anybody who knows Joe knows he’s crazy, and that’s pretty much it,” he said. “But I think it’s, I don’t know, maybe controlled madness. It’s definitely his way of preparing us and I feel like preparing himself and I think it’s been working. He honestly makes you lock in because it’s so different, you definitely have to pay attention to things he says. Sometimes he might talk kind of fast and he might talk through something and you kind of be like, ‘Wait, wait, wait, slow down.’ But I think really locking in helps me because it really makes me go back and be like, ‘Alright, what did he say? This is what we want to do.’ ”

     There’s that. And why is Nike the dog’s name? Tatum signed with Jordan Brand, a Nike shoe. Brown wears a Kobe 6, a Nike shoe.

     Why not Nike? Just win or find a new gig.

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     Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.