Ime Udoka needs to hypnotize the Celtics into believing they’re just playing second and third quarters over and over again. The Celtics have outscored opponents by 40 points in the second quarter this season and by 70 in the third.
It’s too bad they've lost first quarters by 41 points and fourth quarters by 59.
Slow starts and late collapses have marred this Celtics season, and they combined to ruin the Celtics' roller coaster ride in San Antonio Friday night.
“We're great at responding. We're a great counterpunch team,” Grant Williams said after the loss. “But imagine if we were able to knock somebody out in the first round and continue to knock them out throughout and make sure they're not getting up. That's something we have to be better at because, like we said, we get big leads and we take our foot off the gas. Or we start the game and then we come back in. We're not ever that team that, next thing you know, you look up, then, dang, it went from 20 to 40 just like that.”
That’s not the Celtics. Not yet, anyway. Maybe it will never be. No one can say for sure.
This, though, is part of why Ime Udoka was hired. He’s the guy who carved out some semblance of an NBA career without having a ton of NBA skill.
“He wasn’t all that talented. He was just committed, and a competitor, and strong,” Gregg Popovich said of his former player and assistant coach. “Over time he learned how to shoot it a little bit, which really helped him, but it was just that competitive spirit. He’s one of those guys who takes no prisoners, suffers no fools, talks when he has something to say. He’s not going to talk for the sake of talking.”
Udoka paid his bills by fighting from the time he woke up to the time he went to bed. He never had the luxury of easing his way into a game. His current team seems to feel that it does.
“I feel like, at times, we are trying to get ourselves going and not coming ready to play. We shouldn't have to take two or three shots to get us in a rhythm or get us going,” he said of the team’s slow start. “Guys are trying to find their rhythm instead of playing together and that's what it looks like to me in the first quarter at times. Everybody is worried about their game and getting themselves going instead of what's best for the team and playing together.”
It is a damning criticism, especially coming from Udoka who, before the game, called the foundation of basketball “unselfish team play, being selfless on the court, defense and setting the tone. It's hard to really win at a high level without that. It's no magic formula.”
The turn-taking offense and individual forays that pockmark recent Celtics history are the antithesis of what Udoka wants to create. It’s fitting that a start this poor happened in San Antonio, where Tim Duncan, Manu Ginobili, and Tony Parker set the standard for how modern basketball should be played.
“It's stuff you learned when you were a kid, teamwork and sharing and trusting your guys and believing in each other,” Udoka said. “And so it's those basic fundamentals that I learned from Pop, We took it back to almost elementary-type of drills going into training camp that really reinforce habits. And so it's all those things and I always look at it like unselfish offensively, great defensively, and then you always give yourself a chance.”
Brad Stevens wanted so badly to get to that level of Spurs-like basketball, but he could never coax it out of his team. When he moved upstairs, he turned to a part of one of those Spurs teams to do what Stevens couldn’t. We don’t know yet if Udoka will be able to finish that job and get this group of guys to play that way. If he can, it’ll be because he has gotten guys to change their entire way of thinking the game.
“We knew they were a team that switches everything and we just held the ball and tried to do it by ourselves; no ball movement, no penetration for your teammates,” he said. “In the second quarter, third quarter, in the fourth, it was night and day from that. So talk about teams that switch everything, it’s not always for you. Get your teammates involved.”
Teams tend to take on the personality of their best player, and Jayson Tatum is at the head of it all. He is, at his core, an isolation scorer. He’s being molded into a more complete player with plenty of moments in games where that shines through.
But he has to buy in completely and set that tone from the beginning. He can’t spend the early parts of games checking the state of his jump shot. Jaylen Brown is in the same boat.
Both have to be fully committed to the ball movement philosophy from the opening tip. Yes, either of them can get hot during the game, but right now that’s the only way Boston is really scoring.
“We’re going through a little bit of adversity right now, losing two in a row and a game we should’ve won,” Tatum said. “I’m fine with, I guess, being the reason or the blame guy. It doesn’t bother me at all. Understand it’s a long season, but we’re going to figure it out.”
They certainly could. The only people stopping them from doing that are them. I’ve written it here too often to recount and Udoka has undoubtedly spent countless film sessions trying to reinforce the good while discouraging the bad.
“We want them to see how different it looks on film and in person when we do it the right way,” Udoka said. “It's quite evident on film when you see it, a tough shot or playing in a crowd, versus getting off or getting somebody a wide-open shot. So I mention it quite a bit, if guys are making the right plays and we’ll live with the result.”
First quarters are tone-setters, but the Celtics treat them like extended warmups. Instead of trying to figure out who has it going early on, the Celtics could just let the natural flow of the game determine it while also, maybe, going into the second quarter with leads more often.
“You look at teams across the league in the past couple of years, you look at teams like the Bucks, you look at teams like the Warriors of the past, you look at teams like the Spurs of the past, they play, like, you knew that — especially on their home court — you weren't getting a win,” Grant Williams said. “And then on the road games, you would have to fight for that. Right now, we're in that up-and-down flow, rather than them saying like, 'OK, you're playing the Boston Celtics.' And that's the team you're playing against."
Greatness is going to shine through no matter what. The best players on the floor are going to score the most points, regardless of the style of play. I’d even venture to say Tatum and Brown will see their averages go up over the long-term because there will be more easy baskets for everyone.
They just have to buy in for the full 48 minutes, not just the middle 30 or so.