The Other MVP: Caleb Martin Earns Himself A Piece Of History With A Cacophonous Game 7 Performance

It’s a sound very few players ever earn.

Everyone who hears it is going to have a different word for it. A groan. A moan. A murmur. Many collective gasps for air. It’s the sound people make when they don’t know what other sound to make, when the brain is sending one strong signal straight through the nervous system while the vocal cords struggle to keep up.

It’s a sound a crowd makes when a visiting player, one who has hit shot after shot against their favorite team throughout a long series, catches the ball with enough space to do something, anything, with the ball. It’s a sound of frustration, fear, anxiety and exasperations all tangled up in a comic book dialogue bubble populated with nothing but symbols.

It’s a sound of respect.

Fresh off their team winning three straight to force a final Game 7 after falling behind 3-0 in the Eastern Conference Finals, the crowd at TD Garden on Monday night was as raucous as you’ll ever hear. Twenty minutes before the National Anthem was even sung, Paul Pierce strolled out to center court and led a chant for the thousands already in their seats. The setting was electric, that energy coursing through a rather disjointed, ugly opening stanza that was rather fitting for such a momentous occasion.

The Boston Celtics were holding their ground through those early sections of the first quarter, leading 11-10 after eight minutes while both sides struggled to find their footing and their range. As the home team continued to miss from beyond the arc, you could feel that energy becoming a bit more muted, a bit more nervous.

With four minutes to go in that quarter, Caleb Martin caught the ball in the left corner off a penetrating move from Jimmy Butler. It was a bang-bang play, too quick for anyone to process who was doing what before the ball was in the air – but as soon as Martin’s foot-on-the-arc jumper fell through, there was the inkling of that sound.

A few more minutes pass, both teams still languishing in the sort of offensive muck so deep it can only be borne out of seven-games, and multiple postseason matchups, worth of familiarity. Then there was Kyle Lowry, fielding a rebound after a missed layup by Malcolm Brogdon, pushing in transition. And there was Martin, wide open on the right wing.

There was that sound again, coming from a smart, seasoned crowd that knew exactly who had just caught the ball. The sound that very well could have taken the place of the words, ‘Not this guy again.’ The broadcast doesn’t pick it up quite the same, but open your ears and listen for it.

Martin had already been punishing the Celtics. Through six games he was Miami’s second leading scorer, behind Jimmy Butler, putting up 18.2 points a night on 72.2 percent true-shooting. Celtics coach Joe Mazzulla had already tried to recreate the previous season’s Conference Finals to no avail, in Game 2 assigning Robert Williams to defend Martin out of their two-big alignment in a move that was ostensibly meant to allow Williams sag off and roam the paint for help opportunities – the same coverage that had worked so well that Erik Spoelstra couldn’t play Martin in Game 7 a year earlier. Martin rendered that coverage not only useless, but detrimental to Boston’s cause, both hitting jumpers in Williams’ face and finishing through him in the paint.

Martin shocked the crowd that night with 25 points on 16 shots and by the end of it you could hear that fleeting, ephemeral sound beginning to bubble beneath the surface. By Game 4, Mazzulla had all but abandoned the two-big look, unable to find a player suitable for Williams to sag off of. Martin slayed the coverage that had written him out of the previous season’s story.

Game 7 wasn’t about coverages. It wasn’t about disrespect. The Celtics knew what he had been doing, just as their crowd did. Six games on the national stage had built his reputation, Martin’s abilities now a known quantity.

“Caleb definitely made a name for himself,” Bam Adebayo said.

So when Martin caught Lowry’s pass on the right wing and the crowd made that sound, the shot that followed wasn’t about him proving himself. No. He was finding himself. The version of himself that maybe he had been waiting to tap into all along.

The version of himself with a new middle name. Caleb Freaking Martin.

For the past two seasons, Martin has been quite fond of telling people to go check his game film from college. There you could find that different version of him, he insisted, one we very rarely ever got to see of someone with a career 15.4 percent usage rate, one that existed only for those who had the means to find the footage. If you did go looking, the proof was in the pictures, Martin running isolations and pulling up off the dribble – before two years of with HEAT assistant Eric Glass smoothed out his shooting mechanics – with University of Nevada, Reno in the NCAA Tournament.

“That’s how I used to play in college,” was his common refrain, and he would say it with such matter-of-factness, such look-you-in-the-eye confidence that in the moment you would have no choice to believe him.

Now, everyone does. And we know that for a fact because of that sound, that sound of begrudging belief, the one the crowd made every time he made his move.

Open threes? That sound.

Drives into the paint and around helping bodies? Again, that sound.

You could hear it, still, when he had to get a little more creative. When he had to let loose College Caleb, hitting pullup and fading and spin-back jumpers off multi-dribble combinations, that sound was all anyone had left in response.

Either that, or laughter. Laughter at the temerity of it all, that Martin, he of his 9.6 points per game in the regular season on 14.4 percent usage, could be doing this to that team in that building in that game with so much on the line. As a kid, it’s confusing when Billy Crystal and his pals, collapsed on a muddy river bank at the end ofCity Slickers after trying to herd cattle across stormy waters, erupt in sudden laughter. As an adult, you get it. Laughter is a coping mechanism, a way to process extreme circumstances. Watching Martin do what he did to the Celtics, a team full of highly-capable one-on-one defenders, on his way to 26 points on 16 shots, laughter was the only way through it – as long as you weren’t the one he was doing it to.

“I feel like that type of style never leaves you,” Martin said. “I knew it was going to come out at some point, but it was just a great feeling that it came out in a Game 7 on the road like this. It just shows you what I'm capable of, and I just want to continue to stay locked in.”

To put things in perspective, across seven games in the Eastern Conference Finals Martin scored 135 points – 19.6 a game – on 60 percent shooting and 48 percent from three (good for 73.8 percent true-shooting). With at least 40 attempts from three, the list of players who have accomplished that same stretch in the postseason, in any round, is just Seth Curry, one of the best shooters in the league, and Devin Booker, once of the very best scorers.

Only 19 players have ever had a stretch that good in the regular season.

"You get to the higher stakes, the further you get along, the more competitors are going to reveal themselves," Spoelstra said. "Game 7s, or get to the Conference Finals, it's not for everybody in this association. Otherwise more players, more teams would do it. You have to be wired a little bit differently, and Caleb is. He's pure."

For as much as Erik Spoelstra says Butler is the HEAT and the HEAT are Butler, perhaps its Martin whose performance best illustrates how wild and historically significant this postseason run has been. It’d be far too easy just to say that Miami’s shooting is just a team progressing to the mean a year after leading the league in three-point shooting. It’s a nice thought, but it evades the reality that what the HEAT are doing would qualify as incredible for even the best shooting team of all time – case in point being that the actual best shooting team of all-time, the Kevin Durant-edition Golden State Warriors, never accomplished what Miami is in the midst of doing.

The HEAT are now tied with the 2016 NBA Champion Cleveland Cavaliers – the team that came back from being down 3-1 in the Finals – with four games over 50 percent from three on at least 25 attempts. Three of those games came against Boston, a series in which they shot 43.4 percent on 205 three-point shots, making them the sixth team to shoot that well over a seven-game postseason span and only the second team to do so in the conference finals. And that’s after they shot 45 percent in five games against Milwaukee in the first round. If it weren’t for a slump against the New York Knicks, this might be the best run of shooting any team has ever posted in the postseason through 18 games.

You don’t just snap your fingers and reach those heights. You need guys who can take and make all variety of shots, just like Martin can take and make a variety of shots. But you also need that little bit extra, a little bit of that special, magic-adjacent seasoning to put it you over the top. Martin may have conquered his coverage-related demons and, with a series for the ages, siphoned every ounce of respect he could out of the Celtics, but he also fittingly led the team in all categories related to the indescribable. Butler took home the Larry Bird Eastern Conference Finals MVP Trophy, but only by a margin of 5-4 in the voting. One vote in the other direction and Martin would have been handed the hardware, but four votes is enough to cement his place in the all-time ledgers.

“What side of history do you want to be on?”

That’s the question Gabe Vincent posed at shootaround the morning of Game 7. That’s the question everyone on the Miami HEAT probably had to ask themselves after dropping Game 6 and losing three in a row to the Boston Celtics after taking a 3-0 series lead in the Eastern Conference Finals.

Judging by the results, everyone on the team had an answer, their own individual answers, as the team stiff-armed history. But it was Caleb Martin, undrafted Caleb Martin waived by the Charlotte Hornets two summers ago, who had the answer.

That answer was a sound, and the silence that followed.

“I don't think he's going to be a surprise to anybody any longer,” Butler said.