BOSTON — The Celtics have dominated the rest of the NBA this season, and they’ll officially finish with the league’s best record. After Wednesday’s win over the Thunder, the C’s improved to 60-16 on the season. Not only did they hit the 60-win mark, but no other NBA team will pick up that many victories this season.
As part of a dominant 135-100 win over a shorthanded Thunder squad, the Celtics set another NBA record. It’s the 16th time this season the C’s have put together a 25-point win, which is the most in NBA history, per NBC Sports Boston’s Dick Lipe. Three other squads (Bucks in 1970-71, 1971-72 and the Spurs in 2015-16) had 15 such wins each, but the Celtics overcame them all.
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“Celebrating as much as bring it in, shaking everyone’s hand, and saying don’t take it for granted,” C’s coach Joe Mazzulla said of the NBA-best record. “Yeah, we celebrated it. I think that’s important to not take it for granted. I think it’s important to have the gratitude for that. It’s very hard to do. We may never be in this position again, so you don’t want to take it for granted. We definitely talked about it as a team.”
Now, the Thunder didn’t have their top-two scorers in Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Jalen Williams. Still, the Celtics took care of business Wednesday. There have been a few games where the C’s let their play slip when the opposition wasn’t at full strength, and that’s burned them at times. But in the locker room, Mazzulla spoke about treating Wednesday like a “clinching game.”
The Celtics still have six games left in the regular season over the next 1.5 weeks. But they won’t have much to play for as they can instead smooth out lineups and looks. They’ll also make sure to keep their rotation players fully healthy ahead of what they hope will be a deep playoff run.
“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.”
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