All about the C's

 The Boston Celtics are your NBA champions for a record 18th time, and surely now oceans will boil, rivers will run backward and deserts will bloom.

This is not because everyone expected the C's to lose. Most people didn't.

It's because "most people" includes me, who a week or so ago said the Celtics would beat  the Kyrie Irving/Luka Doncic Mavericks in five. And then they went and beat Kyrie and Luka in five.

Now, I've been right about stuff before. Once in 1983, maybe. Or 1965 or 1997 or 2004, one of those years.

But I'm hardly ever exactly right.

This time I was, so all you haters can take a flying leap off a tall building. You can do that even as I acknowledge being exactly right this time wasn't that hard, and it was the Celtics who were responsible.

They were, after all, the best team in the league almost all season, winning 64 games and finishing first in the Eastern Conference by a staggering 14 games. The Mavs, meanwhile, were only the fifth best team in the West, finishing seven games astern of the first-place Oklahoma City Thunder.

But Kyrie and Luka put on a show in the playoffs, and the Mavs knocked out Oke City and Minnesota to reach the NBA Finals, and there was a smidge of received wisdom that because the West was so much stronger than the East this season, Kyrie and Luka would continue ballroom dancing right through the C's.

Except.

Except, the received wisdom either failed to notice, or chose to ignore, that the Celtics played the most vicious lockdown defense in the league. And that they had their own pair of ballroom dancers, Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown.

Who wound up being the dynamic duo of the series, while the Boston D mainly took Kyrie out of the equation and left Luka to win it for the Mavs by himself.

Kyrie had his moments -- notably in the Game 4 blowout win, when he scored 21 points, and in the Game 3 loss, when he scored 35 on 13-of-28 shooting, including 4 of 6 from the 3-point arc. But in the other three games?

Twelve, 16 and 15 points. Eighteen-of-53 shooting, a shade under 34 percent. And except for Game 3, he was 4 of 23 from the arc in the series.

That's a tick under 17.4 percent, if you're keeping score at home.

No way that was going to get it done, even with Luka averaging 29 points per in the Finals. Five beats two, or one, every time, after all. And the Celtics had the five.

So the best team in the NBA this season won it all. Surprise, surprise.