Everything you need to know about the Boston Celtics loss to the Portland Trail Blazers with BSJ insight and analysis
IN A NUTSHELL
The Celtics again struggled with their 3-point shooting, especially Jayson Tatum, and they fell behind early. But, they managed to put together a pretty good second quarter to go into the half with a lead. They squandered it in the third but went up 11 after a big start to the fourth quarter…
… and then it all fell apart. They were outscored 20-5 to close the game, and lost to a bad Blazers team without Damian Lillard.
HEADLINES
Another collapse: They were up 11 with less than six minutes to play. They went 0-10 since making it a 100-89 game. They were 0-6 from 3. They turned it over 3 times and committed 6 fouls.
“I think our execution wasn't as crisp as it had been,” Ime Udoka said. “They obviously went after Jayson, took him out a little bit there, blitzing and throwing double teams at him when they did switch. And we weren’t as crisp, had some turnovers but also missed some open shots that obviously would change the game if we hit those. But it's a little disappointing because we had been better in those situations execution-wise.”
Tatum’s shooting woes persist: Jayson Tatum’s last made 3-pointer came with 2:25 left in the first quarter vs. Chicago on January 15. That's 20 straight misses over 15 full quarters. Tatum is as stumped as everyone else.
“I don’t know. Maybe stuff like this happens every once in a while,” he said. “I know for myself, and I guess some of the other guys who aren’t shooting as well, it’s not going to change how people guard us. They know what myself is capable of and it’s just a matter of getting out of it. And I will, and we’ll be able to talk about something else.”
No fourth quarter Dennis Schroder: Schroder was taken out of the game with 2:15 left in the third quarter and he didn’t come back in until there was less than a minute to go in the game.
“The unit was rolling well. We liked Jayson with the ball in his hands,” Udoka said. “He was playing well there. And it was a defensive thing as well. They had some size that was hurting us. Didn't love how Nurkic was hurting us inside, wanted more rebounding there. And like I said, that group was playing well. We obviously built a lead up to 11 so we rolled with it.”
TURNING POINT
The Celtics scored their 100th point with 7:19 left in the fourth quarter. They didn’t make another field goal, and only managed five made free throws, all in the final 41.5 seconds. They were outscored 20-5 in that stretch.
FOUR UP
Romeo Langford: Romeo was robbed of some much-deserved shine after this latest collapse. My featured story was going to be about how it was Langford, Pritchard, and Grant Williams who made the biggest shots in Boston’s game-changing fourth-quarter run. Langford hit some big shots and attacked the basket, making another case for more rotation minutes.
Payton Pritchard: A couple of big 3-pointers in that early fourth-quarter run.
Grant Williams: He’s shooting with confidence and he even had a couple of drives that showed some future playmaking promise. There's another step to his development after becoming a 3-point threat that includes driving closeouts and finding guys open. He showed some flashes of that.
Jayson Tatum: Most of the 3’s he took were fine (except the last one. More on that in a bit), so I’m not going to crush him for being in a slump. He did have 10 rebounds, 7 assists and he went to the line 14 times. So most of what he did out there was good. If one or two of those 3’s fell, this could be a win and we’d be celebrating a near triple-double.
TWO DOWN
Enes K. Freedom: Maybe Udoka plays him to see if he can get away with some decent minutes and keep everyone else’s minutes down? I didn’t see any reason to put him in the game, and his few minutes in the first half were a disaster.
Robert Williams: He has struggled in both Portland games. Maybe Jusuf Nurkic is just a bad matchup for him. This should have been a game for Williams to catch a few lobs, but he only caught one.
ONE TAKE KARALIS WILL PROBABLY REGRET LATER
The worst habits are the hardest ones to break.
I’ll start with this: It should never have come down to this shot. There are probably a dozen things they could have done differently before this. But here we are.
Time. Score. Situation. The most important things to know at a time like this.
13.1 seconds on the clock, down 1, knowing Nurkic is going to be involved in blitzing. According to Udoka, the play was “him really attacking Nurkic, and using him to get somebody else an open shot. … We knew Nurkic was gonna be up there, and then the [second] part was Rob diving down the lane and Jaylen pulling behind and there was some openings there.”
So there were options for Tatum built into the play.
Here’s my biggest problem:
Tatum crossed over, Nurkic slipped, and Tatum’s gut instinct is to say “oh, I’m open for 3 lemme just take this” when the real play was to drive baseline and use all that open space to get a completely uncontested shot with momentum going to the basket. He could have stepped into a wide-open jumper or, had they presented themselves based on the defense’s reaction, passed to one of those other options.
When asked what he saw, Tatum said “they hedged, I tried to get outside, and they kind of stayed with me. Got a pretty clean shot, and it didn’t go in.”
Time: there were EIGHT seconds left to make a play.
Score: Boston was down ONE.
Situation: A fallen defender, a wide-open swath of parquet, and two teammates in the spots they were supposed to be when the play was drawn up.
This is the push and pull of these plays: It was a clean look. If he makes it, he’s a hero, and no one bats an eye. Maybe I would have said he needed that to go in because of how much space was there for him to take a better shot, but it would have been a minor footnote.
It didn’t go in, so now I get to second guess. But this is all about making the right play, and that wasn’t it, to me. This wasn’t the first quarter where the 3>2 math gets thrown around. This was a 2>1 situation, and until these Celtics collectively wrap their heads around what the right plays are, these will continue to be the results.