Karalis: The search for answers is a confusing one, even for the Celtics

Jayson Tatum yawned his way through his postgame media availability, which felt appropriate on a lot of levels. 

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPZwSoew0wA[/embed]

Metaphorically, it perfectly encapsulated the Boston Celtics on Wednesday night; sleepwalking their way through something they really didn’t want to do. Literally, Tatum probably just wants to get some [expletive deleted] sleep. 

It’s easy to overreact to these moments; to ride the rollercoaster of emotion to dizzying highs and sickening lows. The path of least resistance is to slink into our partisan corners, whip out our scripts, and scream until our winter quarantine brains have spilled their months of pent-up rage. 

To us, the Celtics, and all sports for that matter, exist in a snow globe that we shake for a few hours a night. Eventually, we put it down and move on with our lives until the schedule demands that we pick it up again. 

The Celtics don’t live in that world. Each game doesn’t live in that little bubble. 

And that fuels our disconnect. 

The Celtics are frustrating. They know that. They frustrate themselves too. 

“We just got to find some consistency and I know it's probably tough to watch,” Jaylen Brown said after a loss to Atlanta. “Shit, it's tough to play, but I think that there's a lot to learn and improve on moving towards the future.” 

It’s been a month since that quote and Boston still hasn’t found that consistency. You have questions about them, but they also have questions about themselves. And every time they think they might be moving towards an answer, a game like this one against the Cleveland Cavaliers comes along. 

It’s the equivalent of your computer freezing halfway through an important thing you were working on. There’s a whole lot of yelling and swearing followed by hoping like crazy that, somehow, you are able to save some of your progress. 

You know that feeling, right? You know how mad you get at yourself for not saving your work along the way? 

That’s probably a good basis for understanding how the Celtics feel right now. And just like us as we, at first, save after every sentence before slowly slipping back into the bad habits of waiting longer and longer to do it, the Celtics will probably bounce back before everything eventually freezes again. 

Normally, practices act as a sort of auto-save function, making sure bad habits are kept at arm’s length. But there are no practices in this ridiculous NBA season, and so the Celtics keep on crashing. 

“I think that our team is not as good at any one or two things like in years past,” Brad Stevens admitted before the game. “The deal is you have to be good at something. You have to be able to say, we as a team are really good on the offensive end at this, we as a team are really good at the defensive end at this. And of all the teams we've had, this team's had the hardest time, probably, becoming great at one or two things on each end.”

There are circumstances at play here to explain why that’s the case. There are some people who don’t want to hear those reasons, but they exist. They exist in the same way there are reasons why most of us don’t fit into our pants like we used to.

“I think that's partly because we haven't had the full roster intact very often,” Stevens said. “Certainly there's a lot of other reasons for that, but that's our task. When we become able to identify one or two things to really emphasize and hang on to, and become great at, while having some flexibility down the road. ... That's made us do things and try new things, which hasn't been all bad.”

It hasn’t been all good, either, which is why the Celtics are currently a .500 team closer to the new play-in tournament than they are to the top of the standings. No one cares about the whys of their situation. They only care about how to get out of it. 

There are a lot of questions about the Celtics. The more we pull at the thread, the more it seems to unravel. It’s hard to know what’s real about this team and what’s just ... circumstances. 

The Celtics don’t live in that snow globe, they live in an M.C. Escher lithograph. Or maybe it’s the dot over the i of the Jeremy Bearimy. This season is a maddening run down paths that seem to go nowhere, despite promising to lead them somewhere. The answers are somehow behind doors that lead to the same room. 

Is it Stevens? Is it Danny Ainge? Is it the players? 

Yes. And also no. And also, maybe. 

The team that embarrassed itself for half of a game against the Cavs looked very little like the team that pushed the Utah Jazz to the brink. Of course, they had two starters missing and they were on a back-to-back, which of course brings us right back to where we started. 

Frustrating doesn’t begin to describe the Celtics, but their world demands they move forward because the games just keep coming. Hopefully, something snaps into place.

“All we’re trying to focus on, all we’re going to keep trying to focus on, is playing good basketball,” Stevens said. “If you have a (bad) stretch like that against an NBA team, you’re usually in for a bad night. And when you’re playing a team that played with the kind of urgency and the way they did tonight, they made us pay for that. 

“So, I just want to play good basketball. You guys have been around me long enough that you know what that means, what it looks like, what it feels like, and we saw again some of it. But we don’t do it enough of the time.”