The Rotation: Kelly Olynyk and the Celtics flex, the Wizards bounce

Welcome to The Rotation, our daily playoff wrap-up of our favorite stories, large and small, from last night’s NBA action. (Ed. Note — Everyone else was busy last night, so I went solo).

Remember that time Kelly Olynyk saved Boston?

by Ian Levy (@HickoryHigh)

Kelly Olynyk was filthy in Game 7, a hulking hero ripped from the pages of that dream journal written by your least favorite Celtics’ fan. His 12 points in the first half were hugely important to a Celtics’ team that was struggling to hit from the outside. His 14 points in the fourth quarter were the stuff of legends — minor legends in the greater pantheon of Boston sports, but legends nonetheless.

Olynyk is a skilled big man but to this point in his career he has mostly been defined by that one time he ripped Kevin Love’s arm out of it’s socket, and by that other time when he set a bunch of hard screens on Kelly Oubre Jr. and then flopped the floppiest flop ever when Oubre pushed back.

However Game 7 was decided, it would have created a hero. And even if had been a star, Isaiah Thomas or John Wall, who stepped forward to receive the favor of The Basketball Gods, the moment would have required something more from them. As great as they are, just being Isaiah or John would not have been enough. With higher stakes comes a higher threshold for greatness and any player who wanted to be the hero here tonight would have needed to be the best version of themselves.

If anything, Olynyk’s performance probably overstates that necessity.

Olynyk is not a James Jones, or a Matt Bonner. He is not quite as fringe a contributor as his meager 9.0 points and 4.8 rebounds per game this season my imply. Olynyk is already fourth on the all-time list for 3-pointers made by a 7-footer. He also rebounds well, passes well, can exploit a mismatch in the post and finish around the basket. He’s never going to be an exceptional defender but he boasts healthy steal and block rates, more than enough to keep Boston’s defense chugging along when he’s on the court.

Olynyk was the best version of himself in Game 7, nothing more. He made shots, grabbed rebounds, and kept his body between the Wizards and the basket. This may be the first time you have had to pay attention to his basketball game and not the collateral damage of his enormous body, but it won’t be the last.

He might have a few more heroic moments in him, yet.

The Wizards are who we should have realized they were

by Ian Levy (@HickoryHigh)

Yup. Bench, atrocious. Defensive effort, inconsistent. Offense, really, really needs John Wall to play well. Don’t let the fact that the Wizards won a bazillion games for two months of the regular season, they were still kind of the team we thought they would be at the beginning of the season.

First of all, the Wizards did win 49 games this season — kind of trouncing the preseason win projections from Andrew Johnson at Nylon Calculus (41 wins) and 538 (38 wins). John Wall, Bradley Beal, and Otto Porter all took leaps to varying degrees, and for a healthy chunk of the winter, the Wizards looked like one of the best teams in the league.

The problem is they still had that shaky bench to deal with. And Beal’s limitations as a secondary play-maker. And a defensive edge that seemed to wax and wane daily. The Wizards were like a Bayesian Jackson Pollock this season, just actual and psychological priors being splattered in every direction. The Wizards were a mess last season and that depressed the production of Wall and Beal — both players set career-high marks in Box Plus-Minus this season but their previous career-highs were 2014-15, then they fell off a cliff last year. Those marks, and the bench, had us all a little depressed on the Wizards.

Then they started this season terribly and expectations dropped even lower. The difference between those (newly lowered) expectations and the run they went on in the middle of the season felt like an enormous improvement where, in reality, it was some improvement and some progression to the mean. But, because we all love a good story, we were happy to breathe some hot air into Wizards’ balloon.

Next: 30 best shots in NBA playoffs history

Washington ultimately popped where they probably should have. The Celtics were better in the regular season, by record and by point differential (with or without a strength of schedule adjustment). They had the depth to sustain a long series, which the Wizards did not. It may feel like a disappointment to come this close to breaking new ground, but this is who the Wizards were. We should have known all along.