At this point, writing about the Celtics is like competing in an episode of Chopped.
“And your mystery ingredients are … Jaylen Nowell vastly out-playing Jaylen Brown … Greg Monroe suddenly reappearing and carving up your defense … and 2-14 Celtics shooting from deep in the fourth quarter. Your time starts now!”
There really isn’t much more that can be said about these guys at this point. They’ve told us over and over again who they really are. They’ve screamed it quite loudly. It’s very obvious why this team is maddeningly inconsistent.
It’s because their worst habits are who they actually are, and everything else is only accomplished through intense concentration and some degree of hand-holding.
“We're trying to do the right things,” Al Horford said after the game. “Right now, this is who we are.”
When they want to, the Celtics can put complete performances together. When they are focused and engaged, they’ve shown they can compete with anyone. They move the ball, they defend with force, they run and get transition buckets.
The promise of this team is tantalizing.
But they're just not willing to see things through. Every success is a feather in a cap, not a brick in the foundation. They don’t see wins and good stretches of basketball as something to build on, they see it as a mission they’ve accomplished.
“Certain things can look so easy in the stretch in the third where we got the lead, when you're penetrating and kicking and getting guys wide-open shots, and then two plays later, you're shooting over three guys,” Ime Udoka said. “And so that's a matter of taking poor shot selection, undisciplined shot selection. They called the timeout because we go on a run and we stressed that's how easy it can be. Just penetrate, kick, get it to your open guy, and then come out and revert back to more one-on-one play.”
The Celtics are like a guy who can put on a suit, shave, comb his hair, and walk into work looking like a million bucks. He gets his work done on time, helps a few people button up their projects, and then leaves a folder on the boss’ desk with some great new ideas for the future.
Then he bangs in sick on Thursday and Friday, shows up hungover on Monday, and blows an account.
You can bring that guy in and give him a talking-to, and he’ll have a few-days stretch of being the best employee in the building, but eventually, he’s back to oversleeping and taking two-hour lunches. Because the goof-off is who he really is. That's what he wants to do every day.
Jaylen Brown can certainly walk onto a court like he did at the Target Center and understand he’s going to be the target of the defense. He could have been the zone-killer in the middle of the lane, distributing for his teammates. He very easily could have spent time catching passes on the perimeter and attacking to collapse the defense and give guys open looks.
But instead he wanted to play Superman. He saw a ragtag group of Timberwolves and he salivated at his opportunity to put up a monster game in Jayson Tatum’s absence.
And so for the first few minutes of the game, Brown was being the good soldier. The Celtics were up 11-2 and Brown had zero points but also an assist, a rebound, and only one shot attempt.
In the next 2:21, Brown put up three shots: a highly contested driving hook and then a follow-up that got blocked when he had two wide-open teammates…
… and then a contested fadeaway in the lane where he also had two teammates open.
“Overthinking the game, the game isn't as hard as I made it tonight and I didn't play the way I know I can play,” he admitted. “That was probably one of my worst games of the season as well. My team needed me to make plays and step up and I turned the ball over too much, I missed easy shots, easy reads and we lost.”
This is the ebb and flow of this team. This is how this season is going to go without an absolute change of character.
They will get their talking-to, they will really buckle down and focus, and they’ll look great. They might play 48 minutes of great basketball against the Clippers and we’ll all write our “message received” pieces Wednesday night. They’ll probably slip a little but get away with it against a Suns team that will go from playing a 9 PM game on Wednesday to a 1 PM game on Friday -- which is really 11 AM their time, so they’ll be all out of sorts.
If they follow their script, they’ll be really proud of themselves, and they’ll walk into the Sunday game against Orlando with their chests puffed out. They’ll hear all of us talking about them maybe figuring things out this time and how the January schedule is all set up for them to go on a big run heading into the All-Star break.
And then they’ll give up a 20-4 run to start the game.
Just like that dude in the suit, all they're looking to do is just enough to get back to all the things they love to do that are horrible for them. Brown and Tatum are absolutely fully capable of being everything Brad Stevens and Udoka have wanted them to be, but all they really want to be is isolation scorers. They do the other stuff because they have to.
But it’s the other stuff that will make them truly great. And until they actually understand that -- truly and honestly feel it in their core thea true greatness requires that hard work -- this is what they’ll be. They will remain inconsistent because there will constantly be a battle between the angels and devils on their shoulders.
“I believe, as professional athletes, we all have a job to do,” Horford said. “Coach addresses certain things. He shows us things we need to do. But at the end of the day, as an individual player, you have to take pride individually and look at yourself in the mirror and see how you can be better at things you need to do. It has to be something that has to be consistent. At the end of the day, you have to hold us accountable. All of us are out there. We have to be held accountable and we need to be better. I know we keep saying that. To answer your question, I think individually, we have to look in the mirror and it's not a numbers statement. It's different things within the game that we have to face in order to be better."
This is all true. But are they willing to do that?
Brown was asked about Horford’s answer, about soul searching being important for the team.
“Searching and looking in the mirror?” he asked, looking for clarification.
“Yeah,” the reporter replied.
“Nah, no comment,” he said.
And the ride goes on.