In the middle of the Boston Celtics player introduction video, a loud, piercing tone started blaring over the PA system. The dark arena lit up, revealing a lot of confused faces as the prerecorded message blared a warning that there was some sort of emergency, and evacuation might be necessary.
It turns out it was just a burst pipe at a concession stand.
The alarm did provide an apt metaphor for the Celtics, who follow the same script all too often: A WTF moment, a lot of confusion, and then an abrupt return to normalcy. When Eddie Paladino broke the few minutes of silence by launching, without explanation of the situation, right into the player introductions, there was a distinct “Oh, I guess everything is fine” feeling in the arena.
“I thought it was part of the intro,” Doc Rivers said after the game. “I was thinking, ‘Wow, that’s a loud intro.’ And then the delay … that was just strange.”
The evacuation would have been better for the Celtics.
“We had so many excuses that we were making tonight,” Jaylen Brown admitted after the game. “It was cold in the arena, the fire alarm kind of slowed everything down, we had guys out. Like, who cares? We’ve just got to come out and find a way to bring energy, set the tone and have a sense of urgency about ourselves.”
This battle of wills between the Celtics and their head coach will reach a crescendo at some point this season. Ime Udoka leads the NBA in post-timeout head shaking and muttering to himself, exhibiting the body language of a frustrated dad picking his son up from detention again.
He knows they know what to do. They know they know what to do. They just don’t. Or they stop.
The plan against Joel Embiid was to disrupt his dribble by digging at the ball with guards, helping off certain players but not against others. The Celtics, instead, let Embiid walk into warm-up-level jumpers and let him get hot from an area on the floor they could have otherwise lived with.
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This wasn’t a dominant, ‘Embiid buried Enes K. Freedom under the basket and had his way’ type of game. This is Embiid getting very comfortable and torching Boston with face-ups. By the time he had to take a tough one, like the one he made to ice the game, he was in a very serious flow.
“It’s a shot I had to take,” Embiid said. “I dribbled and I saw the double team coming and at that point, it happened a couple times, where I got doubled and we didn’t cut quick enough and I had no passing lanes and I ended up turning the ball over. So in that situation, I thought I had a good angle and I had been making shots and it was a great shot.”
The Sixers got one point from their bench -- ONE -- and still pulled this off. The Celtics got 14 from Payton Pritchard alone. All the words in this space were supposed to be about him, not completely botching the game plan against the one guy on the other team everyone should be pretty clear about.
“Embiid started feeling comfortable and we don’t want a guy like that to feel comfortable,” Brown said. “Then we made adjustments to rotate and it just felt like we were a little slow in some of those rotations. And we gave up some big baskets. And we’ve gotta do better at adjusting on the fly. We’ve gotta do better. It’s stuff that we normally do well at, but we didn’t do well enough tonight.”
Let’s be honest here, though. Al Horford alone makes a massive difference in this game. Keep everything else the same but have Horford match Embiid’s minutes and the Celtics probably win this thing by 15 because he not only plays better defensively, Horford can actually catch a pocket pass and finish a layup.
There wasn’t much normal about this game. Omicron has taken a huge bite out of this league’s fun start to the season. The officials were letting teams play a bit more and it led to some fun games around the league. Now I’m not sure if the Cavaliers can even field a team on Wednesday, and if they do, it'll basically be a glorified G League team.
The one Sixers bench point shouldn’t surprise anyone. They threw Charles Bassey and Myles Powell on the floor. At one point Aaron Henry committed a foul and it took Paladino about 10 seconds to find his name on the sheet and announce who he was.
This result counts in the standings and it could mean the difference in home-court advantage should these two teams meet in a playoff series, but in a lot of ways it didn’t feel real.
That is, except for the same old slow-start, great middle, late mistake script that these guys follow all too often.
That's still real. And it’s still alarming.