What's wrong with the Celtics? Four areas of concern amid the team's extended skid

The Celtics have now lost six of their last eight games after dropping a four-point contest to the Suns on Saturday night at the TD Garden. Four of those six defeats in the past two weeks have come against sub .500 teams. There are a number of built-in excuses (tough schedule, injuries) but the Celtics are no longer finding a way to win games when they are down some key manpower and that wasn't true in the opening two months of the year. This is a group right now that has Brad Stevens throwing darts at the wall with lineups, cycling through a host of different personnel while playing gimmick defenses at times to try to stop top talent, such as the box-and-1 used on Devin Booker Saturday night amid a 39-point explosion.

The Celtics couldn’t stop Booker or any of the Suns' key supporting pieces on Saturday as DeAndre Ayton scored 26 points and Mikal Bridges each posted 26 points each.

“We’re kind of in a stretch of guys that haven’t shot the highest percentage in the world that have shot really well against us,” Stevens said. “In the first half we missed him on a couple of opportunities that were system mistakes, and in the second half they did a good job of playing out of the trap with Booker, because he was killing us. We played a little bit of a zone. We were going to take our chances with other guys – Saric and Bridges hit a couple of big ones when we cut it to five.”

With the caveat that the C’s have not been at full strength, the slumping has reached a level now where it is worth taking a big picture view of what’s going on with this group. What’s costing this team games? Can it be fixed internally? Has a hot start to the season faded for good? Let’s explore four areas of concern for this group over an ugly past few weeks.

1. No one besides Marcus Smart is hitting 3s routinely: The sixth-year guard managed to bump his 3-point shooting percentage up by two percentage points with his historic performance on Saturday night. However, he’s been the only member of the C’s knocking down shots during this latest funk. Smart is shooting 44 percent from downtown over the last eight games (50 percent in the last two alone) but beyond that? Only Grant Williams (37 percent) is shooting better than 33 percent from downtown during that stretch. Hayward, Brown, Tatum and Walker are all stuck between 31-33 percent while the carnage gets worse with Ojeleye (30 percent), Wanamaker (30 percent) and Theis (26 percent). For a team that takes over 34 3s per game, it’s tough to overcome this type of slumping from the perimeter. Even though all of the attention is how the slippage on defense, Boston’s offense still has almost been just as bad in the past three weeks, ranking 16th in the NBA.

2. Slow starts: Boston fell behind by 16 in the first quarter on Saturday night, continuing a trend of inept starts no matter who is healthy on any given night. Over the first six minutes of each game, Boston ranks 28th in point differential, getting outscored by an average of 15 points per 48 minutes. They have now trailed after the first six minutes in 12 of their last 15 games and its been double-digits in five of their last 10 games. The common thread in these slow starts? Poor shooting starts by the starting five and Marcus Smart, particularly from 3-point range. While Brad Stevens has been adamant about playing his best four guys together (plus Theis) to begin games, these ongoing struggles makes it worth wondering whether its time to shake things up for the sake of getting some better offensive balance.

It’s hard to judge too much from Saturday night with Brown and Walker out due to injury but Grant Williams (zero points in 13 minutes) clearly wasn’t the right piece to help solve the issue in Walker’s absence.

“I was hoping we’d start more physically,” Stevens said. “I was hoping we’d start more into the body. We were starting better. I thought we tried on a couple of possessions to guard. I thought there were a couple of things that were -- if you do all the right things, if one person has a little slip up, that’s hard for us. We didn’t play as good offensively in that stretch, although we missed some open shots, I think. That was a little bit to be expected because that lineup was geared more towards being physical and defensive and those types of things.”

3. Rookies aren’t ready to take bigger roles: Depth was always going to be a question mark for this team with seven rookies saddled across the roster when you include two-way deals. Someone is going to have to be a difference-maker in that group or at least average in order for this group to succeed when injuries are a factor. That hasn’t been the case at all in the past few weeks. Two-way player Tremont Waters was the bench player on the court against the Suns (+17) but his questionable shot selection earned him a seat on the bench for a lot of the fourth quarter. Elsewhere, guys aren’t helping the C’s enough Grant Williams has been inconsistent with his shot and defensive rotations. Javonte Green has too many lapses on the defensive end. Carsen Edwards played poorly enough he was sent to Maine to get some confidence back. Vincent Poirier is still buried at the end of the bench even when Enes Kanter struggles. With Romeo Langford still not in Stevens’ trust tree (his DNP-CD was surprising on Saturday), there’s a startling lack of depth on this team now when multiple injuries hit. The Celtics bet big on development by using nearly all of their draft capital this past year but a lot of those picks aren’t panning just yet. That’s understandable at this point but having so many of these guys littered throughout the roster is costing the team wins in the present when they are being asked to do more than they are ready for. With veteran bench pieces like Brad Wanamaker and Enes Kanter struggling recently too, there has been nowhere for Stevens to turn for consistency.

4. The Celtics are doing virtually nothing at an elite level: Amid the four factors on both ends of the floor in the past eight games (FG%, free throw rate, turnover rate, rebounding), the only thing the C’s are doing well right now is defensive rebounding. They aren’t hitting shots, taking care of the ball or getting to the free-throw line at a solid rate. They also aren’t defending the 3 or limiting fouling either. A lack of discipline right now on the defensive end is troubling and leading to mistakes in all areas of the floor.

“We’ve talked about it,” Stevens said. “If we don’t pressure the ball, the ball gets too deep, and we saw it with Ayton today, he just bullied us. But we just have to get a little bit better. This will be a good stretch when we look back on it because it will force improvement. It’ll force urgency on every detail, it’ll force you to do your job for 48 minutes. These are never fun to go through. It sucks. But this is usually what you look back on and say it was a springboard for you.”

Earlier this year, the bench was playing better defense to make up for its defensive shortcomings and that’s no longer happening. The question now is how much of this to pin on guys playing out of normal roles due to injuries or whether this is the whole team just regressing to the mean. Stevens remains confident its the former.

“ I think we can play a little bit better, a little bit tighter,” Stevens said. 
“Our search for depth as far as who fits with who best is still ongoing and I don’t know if it’s fair to really assess it yet until we get everybody out there. Grant might be a really good fit when Kemba and Jaylen are back in certain lineups, right? So I don’t look at anybody’s performances, not good or whatever. I’m just looking for how will it all fit when it comes together.”

With under three weeks left to the trade deadline, the sample size of subpar play is getting rather large for some of the younger guys. They don’t look to be ready for the roles they are handed and with the schedule getting tougher, things could get ugly from here. Without some better health or a trade upgrade, it’s hard to see all of these issues going away and that could leave this team trending more towards the sixth seed than second heading into the All-Star Break.