Karalis: Nothing changes, which is the worst part of this Celtics season

This Celtics season is the basketball equivalent of Clark Griswold getting stuck in the Lambeth Bridge Roundabout in European Vacation. We're stuck in this loop, it's impossible to get out, and every once in a while we see a couple of cool things ,but even that gets old after a while.

And so we all sat in our collective seats after another tough loss for the Celtics in which they showed their best and their worst, talking over Zoom, asking the same questions and getting the same answers.

Hey Kemba Walker, you're really letting your frustrations show. Why is that?

"I was pretty frustrated early, and as one of the leaders, I just can’t show it on my face like that," he said. "I can’t show the frustration as much as I did earlier in the game. I thought it carried over to my teammates. So I definitely told my teammates that at the end of the game, as a leader I have to be better and help them in that sense."

Hmm, sounds familiar. Let's go back to a loss to the Hawks last month.

"I have to take accountability as one of the leaders and being that guy. I have to be better. I have to be more vocal. I have to kind of be the example especially knowing that we lost two tough games, playing a back-to-back. I take a lot of accountability for just the way we played today, I guess and have been playing."

Or maybe it was after a loss to the Pistons

"Just as one of the leaders of the team, I just have to be more energized from the beginning of the game and just have my guys ready to go."

Maybe "Groundhog Day" would have been a better movie comparison; just a series of repeated days, some good, some bad, but at the end, always pretty much the same. Because that's where this team is.

Against the Bucks, the Celtics fell back into their old pattern of stinking in the middle of games instead of at the end, choosing to go for the "furious comeback" storyline instead of the "heartbreaking collapse" version.

"Maybe we have a few patterns," Brad Stevens said after the game.

However many they have, they all need to be broken. Maybe the Thursday trade deadline will do the trick, somehow shocking this roster into some sensibility. Or at least give us something new to talk about.

That might be the worst part of all of this; this treadmill of mediocrity just gives us nothing new. No new answers. No new questions. No new progress. And no new opportunities to change any of it.

"I feel like, obviously, we don't have much time left, when you look at it from a big-picture standpoint," Stevens said before the game. "We started 19-19 one year and ended up with 48 wins. We've been 13-13 and same thing. But each season is a little bit different than any of those, and we're further along in this season, and really haven't started separating ourselves by any means."

Walker is a notoriously gregarious guy who normally plays half the game with a smile, but even he gets consumed by the moment. Against the Bucks, he sat after another non-call on one of his drives, staying down in frustration to yell at the refs instead of running back down the court.

That's not who he normally is.

"You're in the moment, it’s tough sometimes. It just is what it is," he said. "When you’re in the moment, you’ve got to try to get yourself out of it. ... I know I’ve said it before. I would like to stop, obviously, but it happens."

Of course it does. And it will happen again six games from now when we're right back to this point. That's how this treadmill works.

Friday will be the big bounce-back win to give us the "hmmm, maybe they're not so bad" feeling. Saturday will be the "play well but lose because they're shorthanded" game. That'll be followed by a few impressive wins at home (whew!) and then a loss to Charlotte where they're outscored 35-14 in the fourth because Terry Rozier and Gordon Hayward go bananas.

That is, unless Danny Ainge does something about this by 3 p.m. tomorrow. Maybe a deal will help change this very predictable future. Maybe the introduction of a few thousand fans will give these guys a bit of a jolt.

Do I still hold the same positivity and hope for progress I did two days ago? Of course I do, because nothing changes this season. They haven't done anything to change any of our minds, or anything else for that matter.

So for now, I'll just hang out and wait for Big Ben and Parliament to come around again.