Culture
In NBA Finals, Celtics and Mavs face different challenges from what they just conquered
Each NBA playoff series is its own distinct event, with no real continuity point between the end of one and the beginning of another.
The Minnesota Timberwolves, for instance, knocked off the defending champion Denver Nuggets, but that didn’t automatically make them kings of the hill; a series against the Dallas Mavericks in the next round posed a completely different set of challenges, and the Timberwolves’ roster was much less able to handle those. Similarly, the brave fight the Indiana Pacers put up against the Boston Celtics in the Eastern Conference finals tells us almost nothing about what might happen to Boston in a series against Dallas; aside from a proclivity for employing Rick Carlisle, Indiana and Dallas could hardly be less alike.
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That’s a crucial morsel of knowledge to retain in the coming days, as we survey every possible angle in our extended break before the NBA Finals between the Celtics and Mavericks begins June 6. Dallas has won six of its past seven games, capped by its elimination of Minnesota on Thursday, while Boston has won 12 of 14 with a double-digit scoring margin.
Yet using those games as a predictive point for what might happen in the NBA Finals is a fatal flaw: The matchup for both these teams will be completely different from what they faced the round before. In that sense, it’s probably good that Dallas and Boston have a few days off to recalibrate. The formula for winning in the next round will be radically different.
GO DEEPER
Previewing the 2024 NBA Finals: Key storylines in Mavs vs. Celtics
Take the Celtics, for instance, who just finished a series against one of the most extreme teams in basketball and now need to adjust to a very different type of team at both ends. The Pacers’ defensive approach, in particular, is almost 180 degrees from that of Dallas. The Pacers gave up the fewest 3-point attempts in the league this season and were more than willing to allow drives to the rim as long as they shut off the 3-point line.
While they did this part imperfectly against the Celtics — Boston still launched 43 triples per game in the conference finals, right in line with its season totals — it’s still a radically different approach from what Dallas did in its three playoff rounds. The Mavs tried to protect the basket at all costs with rim protectors Dereck Lively II and Daniel Gafford, holding opponents to just 50.2 percent shooting on 2s in the playoffs entering Game 5 against Minnesota.
The Mavs didn’t give up a huge quantity of 3s overall, but there was a certain type they were willing to concede — pick-and-pop 3-pointers from opposing centers. The Clippers and Wolves didn’t have the starting personnel to hurt them here, but Dallas let Chet Holmgren and Jaylin Williams fire away for the Thunder (42 attempts in six games), while Minnesota backup Naz Reid ripped off 25 3-point attempts in 132 minutes in the conference finals.
Needless to say, this is a highly questionable strategy to pursue against the Celtics if Kristaps Porziņģis is healthy (he is expected to return for the NBA Finals). Porziņģis shot 37.5 percent from 3 this season on over six attempts per game, and many of his tries are from several feet beyond the 3-point line. For that matter, Boston big man Al Horford made 41.9 percent.
Dallas isn’t the only team that has faced this problem. Keeping rim protectors near the rim has been a vexing question for Boston opponents all season, one that has seen multiple original but unsuccessful solutions. Golden State, for instance, tried to put Draymond Green on Jaylen Brown, keep Green in the paint and dare Brown to shoot 3s in a March game. Brown made five 3s in the first seven minutes and was well on his way to breaking Wilt Chamberlain’s scoring record before the Warriors reconsidered.
I was at that game, and my column from that weekend delves further into the unique dilemmas presented by Boston’s superior shooting at every position. The short version: Teams that strive to take away 3s and live with basket attacks, like Indiana, are the only ones that have a chance against the Celtics. Sure, the Pacers gave up points, but they also beat Boston twice in the regular season and had them dead to rights in Game 1 of the conference finals before fate intervened … with a late 3-pointer.
Dallas, in contrast, was a middle-of-the-pack team in preventing opponent 3s and has played that way again in the playoffs. The Mavs’ big conundrum is figuring out how to contort a defensive strategy that was close to optimal for playing the Clippers, Thunder and Wolves and adapt it to playing a very different Boston team. Recent events don’t augur well on that front; when the Mavs marched into Boston with all their new trade pieces in March, they lost 138-110, with Boston shooting 21 of 43 on 3s.
The Celtics, however, have some adjusting of their own to do. Whereas Indiana ran the ball down their throat every possible chance with whomever had the rock, Dallas plays a much slower and more heliocentric style. Yes, the Mavs will run opportunistically, but compared to playing the Pacers, it will feel like switching from a techno rave to Gregorian chants.
Additionally, the player at the controls for Dallas is possibly the best offensive player in the league, and he’s operating against a defense that essentially has one weakness — not really being able to switch across five positions. We saw how that worked out for Minnesota, the league’s top-ranked defense. Can the Celtics really survive a series in drop coverage against 40-plus minutes of Luka Dončić and Kyrie Irving? Or do they need to get uncomfortable?
While the Celtics have more roster optionality (they could perhaps put Porziņģis on Derrick Jones Jr. to switch against Dallas’s pick-and-roll game with Lively and Gafford, for instance) and two All-Defense guards in Jrue Holiday and Derrick White, Dončić has seen and figured out every coverage.
Obviously, there’s a lot more to unpack here — Porziņģis and Irving revenge series! Luka’s first NBA Finals! Jayson Tatum’s shot at redemption! Reflections on the Grant Williams era! We’ll have plenty of time to get to it all, but it almost seems like a relief these teams have an intermezzo before this final round. Each will need it for a full tactical revamp.
Required Reading
(Photo of Luka Dončić and Al Horford: Maddie Meyer / Getty Images)
Maybe you woke up this morning haunted by the first four lines of W.H. Auden’s “The More Loving One” — or tickled by its tongue-in-cheek handling of existential dread. (Not ringing any bells? Click here to begin the Poetry Challenge).
This is a love poem. Perhaps that seems like an obvious thing to say about a poem with “Loving” in its title, but there isn’t much romance in the opening stanza.
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
Ada Limón, poet
Nonetheless, the poem soon makes clear that love is very much on its mind.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
David Sedaris, writer
The polished informality gives the impression of a decidedly cerebral speaker — someone who’s looking at love philosophically, thinking about how it works and what it means.
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Reginald Dwayne Betts, poet
Musing this way — arguing in this fashion — he stands in a long line of playful, thoughtful poetic lovers going back at least to the 16th century. He sounds a bit like Christopher Marlowe’s passionate shepherd:
Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.
Auden’s poem, like Marlowe’s, is written in four-beat lines:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Josh Radnor, actor
And it features strong end rhymes:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Samantha Harvey, writer
These tetrameter couplets represent a long-established poetic love language. Not too serious or sappy, but with room for both earnestness and whimsy. And even for professions of the opposite of love, as in this nursery rhyme, adapted from a 17th-century epigram:
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell
The reason why I cannot tell.
But this I know and know full well
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.
There is some of this anti-love spirit in Auden’s poem too, but it mainly follows a general rule of love poetry: The person speaking is usually the more loving one.
This makes sense. To write a poem requires effort, art, inspiration. To speak in verse is to tease, to cajole, to seduce, all actions that suggest an excess of desire. That’s why it’s conventional to refer to the “I” in a poem like this as the Lover and the “you” as the Beloved. The line “Let the more loving one be me” could summarize a lot of the love poetry of the last few thousand years.
But who, in this case, is the beloved? This isn’t a poem to the stars, but about them. Or maybe a poem that uses the stars as a conceit and our complicated feelings about them as a screen for other difficult emotions.
What the stars have to do with love is a tricky question. The answer may just be that the poem assumes a relationship and then plays with the implications of its assumption.
This kind of play also has a long history. Since love is both abstract and susceptible to cliché, poets are eager to liken it to everything else under the sun: birds, bees, planets, stars, the movement of the tides and the cycle of the seasons. Andrew Marvell’s “Definition of Love,” from the 1600s, wraps its ardor in math:
As lines, so loves oblique may well
Themselves in every angle greet;
But ours so truly parallel,
Though infinite, can never meet.
The literary term for this is wit. The formidable 18th-century English wordsmith Samuel Johnson defined a type of wit as “a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike.” “The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together,” he wrote; that kind of conceptual discord defines “The More Loving One.”
The second stanza is, when you think about it, a perfect non sequitur. A hypothetical, general question is asked:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Mary Roach, writer
The answer is a personal declaration that is moving because it doesn’t seem to apply only or primarily to stars:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Tim Egan, writer
Does this disjunction make it easier or harder to remember? Either way, these couplets start to reveal just how curious this poem is. We might find ourselves curious about who wrote them, and whom he might have loved. Tomorrow we’ll get to know Auden and his work a little better.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
Your task today: Learn the second stanza!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
Literature
Oedipa Maas from ‘The Crying of Lot 49’ (1966) by Thomas Pynchon
“The unforgettable, cartoonish protagonist of this unusually short novel is a California housewife accidentally turned private investigator and literary interpreter, and the mystery she’s attempting to solve — or, more specifically, the conspiracy she stumbles upon — is nothing less than capitalism itself,” says Ngai, 54. “As Oedipa traces connections between various crackpots, the novel highlights the peculiarly asocial sociality of postwar U.S. society, which gets figured as a network of alienations.”
Sula Peace from ‘Sula’ (1973) by Toni Morrison
“Sula arguably begins to disappear as soon as she’s introduced — despite the fact that the novel bears her name. Other characters die quickly, or are noticeably flat. This raises the politically charged question of who gets to ‘develop’ or be a protagonist in American novels and who doesn’t. The novel’s unusual character system is part of its meditation on anti-Black racism and historical violence.”
The speaker of ‘Lunch Poems’ (1964) by Frank O’Hara
“Lyric poems are fundamentally different from narrative fiction in part because they have speakers as opposed to narrators. Perhaps it’s a stretch to nominate the speaker of ‘Lunch Poems’ as a main character, but this book changed things by highlighting the centrality of queer counterpublics to U.S. culture as a whole, and by exploring the joys and risks of everyday intimacy with strangers therein.”
This interview has been edited and condensed.
More in Literature
See the rest of the issue
Let’s memorize a poem! Not because it’s good for us or because we think we should, but because it’s fun, a mental challenge with a solid aesthetic reward. You can amuse yourself, impress your friends and maybe discover that your way of thinking about the world — or even, as you’ll see, the universe — has shifted a bit.
Over the next five days, we’ll look closely at a great poem by one of our favorite poets, and we’ll have games, readings and lots of encouragement to help you learn it by heart. Some of you know how this works: Last year more Times readers than we could count memorized a jaunty 18-line recap of an all-night ferry ride. (If you missed that adventure, it’s not too late to embark. The ticket is still valid.)
This time, we’re training our telescopes on W.H. Auden’s “The More Loving One” — a clever, compact meditation on love, disappointment and the night sky.
Here’s the first of its four stanzas, read for us by Matthew McConaughey:
The More Loving One
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
Matthew McConaughey, actor and poet
In four short lines we get a brisk, cynical tour of the universe: hell and the heavens, people and animals, coldness and cruelty. Commonplace observations — that the stars are distant; that life can be dangerous — are wound into a charming, provocative insight. The tone is conversational, mixing decorum and mild profanity in a manner that makes it a pleasure to keep reading.
Here’s Tracy K. Smith, a former U.S. poet laureate, with the second stanza:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Tracy K. Smith, poet
These lines abruptly shift the focus from astronomy to love, from the universal to the personal. Imagine how it would feel if the stars had massive, unrequited crushes on us! The speaker, couching his skepticism in a coy, hypothetical question, seems certain that we wouldn’t like this at all.
This certainty leads him to a remarkable confession, a moment of startling vulnerability. The poem’s title, “The More Loving One,” is restated with sweet, disarming frankness. Our friend is wearing his heart on his well-tailored sleeve.
The poem could end right there: two stanzas, point and counterpoint, about how we appreciate the stars in spite of their indifference because we would rather love than be loved.
But the third stanza takes it all back. Here’s Alison Bechdel reading it:
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Alison Bechdel, graphic novelist
The speaker downgrades his foolish devotion to qualified admiration. No sooner has he established himself as “the more loving one” than he gives us — and perhaps himself — reason to doubt his ardor. He likes the stars fine, he guesses, but not so much as to think about them when they aren’t around.
The fourth and final stanza, read by Yiyun Li, takes this disenchantment even further:
Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.
Yiyun Li, author
Wounded defiance gives way to a more rueful, resigned state of mind. If the universe were to snuff out its lights entirely, the speaker reckons he would find beauty in the void. A starless sky would make him just as happy.
Though perhaps, like so many spurned lovers before and after, he protests a little too much. Every fan of popular music knows that a song about how you don’t care that your baby left you is usually saying the opposite.
The last line puts a brave face on heartbreak.
So there you have it. In just 16 lines, this poem manages to be somber and funny, transparent and elusive. But there’s more to it than that. There is, for one thing, a voice — a thinking, feeling person behind those lines.
When he wrote “The More Loving One,” in the 1950s, Wystan Hugh Auden was among the most beloved writers in the English-speaking world. Before this week is over there will be more to say about Auden, but like most poets he would have preferred that we give our primary attention to the poem.
Its structure is straightforward and ingenious. Each of the four stanzas is virtually a poem unto itself — a complete thought expressed in one or two sentences tied up in a neat pair of couplets. Every quatrain is a concise, witty observation: what literary scholars call an epigram.
This makes the work of memorization seem less daunting. We can take “The More Loving One” one epigram at a time, marvelling at how the four add up to something stranger, deeper and more complex than might first appear.
So let’s go back to the beginning and try to memorize that insouciant, knowing first stanza. Below you’ll find a game we made to get you started. Give it a shot, and come back tomorrow for more!
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
Your first task: Learn the first four lines!
Let’s start with the first couplet. Fill in the rhyming words.
Monday
Love, the cosmos and everything in between, all in 16 lines.
Tuesday (Available tomorrow)
What’s love got to do with it?
Wednesday (Available April 22)
How to write about love? Be a little heartsick (and the best poet of your time).
Thursday (Available April 23)
Are we alone in the universe? Does it matter?
Friday (Available April 24)
You did it! You’re a star.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
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