The Boston Celtics really needed that win over the Orlando Magic.
That this is the prevailing refrain after this game is as damning a reflection on this team as anything. Players-only meetings, no matter what form they take, shouldn’t be happening by election day. The most contentious November team dinner should be the fight over passing the last piece of pie at Thanksgiving, not passing the ball in crunch time.
Yet here they sit, somehow still fending off the drama after what should have been a calm Wednesday walk in the park.
The Orlando Magic were supposed to be a nice vanilla ice cream cone after a week of eating ghost peppers. And on the court, they were. Still, there’s no escaping the indigestion of the start to this season.
Now imagine if they didn’t have Al Horford.
While the younger Celtics try to get over their slap fight, Horford has quietly gone about his business of being the most important player on this team right now.
“Al's been great,” Ime Udoka said. “We rely on him to do a lot of different things. He can score in different areas, initiate offense from the top and post and it was some of the same tonight.”
Horford spent time in the middle of an Orlando zone defense, prime real estate for destroying it, and picked it apart. When the Celtics needed to push the ball in transition, Horford grabbed the ball and initiated the offense, playing point-center, dishing a team-high seven assists, and putting the young Magic in their place.
“I really enjoy doing that,” Horford said. Of course he does. Every big man dreams of being a point guard, and he’s living the dream right now. “I’m able to make decisions, kind of get the ball moving and things like that ... I feel like that's kind of what fits my game the best. I was excited to be able to be in that position, get the ball moving, and show a different look than we had.”
The Celtics have, frankly, wasted this golden stretch of Horford’s best basketball since, well, he was with the Celtics. As Jayson Tatum, Jaylen Brown, and Marcus Smart fight over who has shotgun, Horford’s been driving the bus defensively. He leads the NBA in blocked shots, boasting a block rate currently twice his previous career-high. According to Cleaning The Glass, his defensive rebounding percentage is nearly 7% higher than his previous career-high -- which came during his rookie year.
“He's been blocking shots all year,” Udoka said. “He's been doing it on both ends. We're asking him to do a lot guarding perimeter guys and also be one of our best help team defenders and he's done that.”
He’s 35 years old now, so some of these numbers are certainly going to tail off some. There will be some point of the season where the grind of it all will wear him down and cause him to miss some time. He’s playing in back-to-backs right now, but there might be some down the road that he’ll miss just for the sake of making sure he’s still doing this after the clocks jump forward again.
That’s why this messy start to the season is especially frustrating. Here the Celtics have a great example of work ethic and team-first leadership, and the guys the team is counting on most seem to be caught fighting in a bag of individual, ego-centric fertilizer.
Horford has seen this before, because he’s seen basically everything the NBA has to offer by this point. He knows where this could be headed.
“I think the biggest thing, and I told the guys, is making sure that we make the most out of this opportunity,” he said. “When I look back on my long NBA career, I know there's definitely some teams that are like ‘man if we could have,” or ‘if this were to happen or that were to happen,’ you know? I don't want to have any regrets. I think our group is committed. We're committed to continuing to get better, to take advantage of this opportunity that we have.”
Regret is a learned emotion. It’s strongest only when we realize how little time we truly have. Young people, especially those with strong wills and stronger bodies, feel impervious to it because they see nothing but a long road and the horizon.
It’s not until you see the edge of the cliff in the distance that you truly feel it creep in. It’s when you realize this ride has no brakes that you really replay the wouldas, couldas, and shouldas.
That cliff comes fast in the NBA. Wasted opportunities are magnified.
The Celtics may come to regret losing this stretch of Horford’s play to whatever petty beef may exist. They still have time, though, to listen to his advice. Because it’s even better than what he’s been doing on the court.
