Everything you need to know about the Boston Celtics 123-104 loss to the Brooklyn Nets with BSJ insight and analysis.
IN A NUTSHELL
This section will be short.
Brooklyn walked into the gym and waxed the parquet with the Celtics from the jump. Patty Mills exploded out of the gates, Kevin Durant was unstoppable, and the Nets made it look easy. The Celtics, meanwhile, did more settling than the Pilgrims. Their intensity rose in the fourth quarter as they made their obligatory run, but it was too big a hill to climb.
HEADLINES
This was a step back: After an 11-game stretch where the Celtics looked fix a lot of their issues, some bad ones resurfaced.
“I felt that was the first time in a while that we got out-hustled and outworked,” Ime Udoka said. “They came out playing harder than us from the start. And then and then you compound it with the missed shots. And so it's obviously a different game if you're making shots.”
The offense needs so much work: Boston’s offense is the Portland Trailblazers of the East: if Jayson Tatum or Damian Lillard are hitting shots and playing well, the offense looks good. If either is not, then it’s very, very blah.
TURNING POINT
Halfway through the fourth quarter, with the Celtics trying to make a comeback, Tatum missed a sidestep corner 3-pointer and then Durant finished a tough and-1 to quell Boston’s run.
Really, though, the turning point could easily have been the jump ball. Brooklyn opened the game on a 14-5 run and barely looked back.
THREE UP
Marcus Smart: The 20 points are fine but it’s pretty hard to get 8 assists when the team is shooting 37.4% from the field. Smart was the catalyst behind the fourth quarter final push, and maybe if he and Tony Brothers weren’t in some kind of pissing match (more on that later), that run might have gone differently.
Romeo Langford: He continues to find himself in the middle of good things for the Celtics. I thought he had a few good moments out there keeping plays alive.
Enes Kanter: Let’s give him some credit for the 4 offensive rebounds and 2 blocked shots.
THREE DOWN
Jayson Tatum: Of the 16 shots he took, four came at the rim. He was a -33 on the night, basically on the floor for everything bad. It feels like he wanted that one-on-one matchup against Kevin Durant and he tried to out-KD KD. If anything, this game shows how wide the gap is between Tatum and Durant. KD casually got whatever he wanted. Tatum worked hard to get similar shots. Durant hit half his shots. Tatum hit a quarter of his.
Durant lives in the midrange because he hits those shots regularly. Tatum cannot. The numbers bear that out. Tatum has to be a rim-first, jumper-second player. He’s not quite there yet.
Dennis Schroder: I guess he was bound for this crash back to earth. On the plus side, he only had one turnover. He was 3-10 from the field, including 1-5 from 3.
Al Horford: Tough one for Horford. He’s at his best when the ball is moving. When he’s reduced to a spot-up 3-point shooter, then his best basketball is left on the floor.
TOP PLAY
A Marcus Smart 4-point play 👌 pic.twitter.com/yWHkIP58O0
— Celtics on NBC Sports Boston (@NBCSCeltics) November 25, 2021
ONE TAKE KARALIS WILL PROBABLY REGRET LATER
Celtics vs. the officials: the ultimate battle that will never be won.
For those of you who don’t know me, I hate talking about the refs. If games come down to a referee’s call, then there are usually a dozen things a team could have done better to win that game before putting it in an official’s hands.
The officiating was not good tonight. James Harden and the Nets were getting last season’s calls, not this year’s “let them play” whistles. Harden jumped two feet forward on a jumper, landed near Aaron Nesmith’s feet, fell, and got a call.
That’s not supposed to happen anymore.
Now that that’s out of the way, it’s not supposed to matter.
“We can't let that stuff get to us,” Horford said. “We have to understand that we're out there competing and we need to be able to move on and we did that, at times, but I think we let it affect us too much at the core of our group. It's something that we need to learn from and we need to understand that at the end of the day, calls are going to be made. We may not agree with them but we have to be able to play through that stuff, that's just the reality.”
That's absolutely right.
It’s hard. It gets frustrating, especially when Tony Brothers calls three fouls against Smart in 12 seconds. One was a good call, one wasn’t, and was meh, but by the third one Brothers was obviously caught up in the moment with the force of his foul signal.
But it doesn’t matter. And by then it was the fourth quarter so it doesn’t excuse how much it bothered the Celtics this game or how much it seems to continue to bother the Celtics seemingly every night.
No matter where you fall on this, even if you think the officials robbed the Celtics blind tonight, here’s one thing you can’t deny: the Celtics are not winning this battle. For as much as they complain, there’s just no light at the end of this tunnel. So somehow, some way, they need to get past it and stop letting it impact their play.