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've been progressing the right way, so that's why this one does sting more than the others,” Ime Udoka said after the loss to Portland. “I felt like we had learned from those early season situations and have to stay consistent as far as that. Like I said, shots are going to fall or they're not. We just have to make the right plays and other guys are going to have to step up.”
The Celtics should be better than this. They should be winning games like this. And each game, there seems to be a little something different that keeps them from doing so. They are the masters of misdirection, reverting to their worst very soon after showing their best.
“We had turned somewhat of a corner lately in some fourth quarters, made the proper plays defensively and offensively,” Udoka said. “So felt like we took a little step back as far as that, obviously, in the fourth quarter with the end of game drought and the run they made. But even with that being said, I think the things we can control -- you know, you’re not always going to be able to make shots -- Obviously got to get the right looks and other guys gotta step up if they take it out of Jayson's hands.”
Part of how Portland did that was by going to a zone, which presented a conundrum for Boston: Beating the zone generally means getting the ball in the middle of it somehow because that's a spot on the floor where everyone’s responsibilities overlap. Generally, by getting it in the middle, a team can run cutters along the baseline and pick the zone apart.
Boston didn't do much of any of that. This is a constant problem for the Celtics facing zone defenses. The Toronto Raptors and Miami Heat have torn the Celtics apart with zone in the past. It’s especially tough with Jayson Tatum effectively running point for the fourth quarter. His size and gravity at the free throw line forces a lot of overreactions. But with the ball in his hands, it was up to others to try to get the job done.
“The shooting is a part of it. … Portland had been playing quite a bit so we had prepped for that,” Udoka said. “Then at times, the ball can’t just move around the perimeter. You still have to attack, and that’s the bottom line. It forces a lot of jump shots. You saw it against the Clippers and teams like that where we didn’t shoot it well against the zone. We got good looks. Tonight, I feel like we didn’t get the exact same looks, the quality of looks, so that’s on me to get us into situations to get the proper looks out of the zone.”
If the Celtics are not going to take passes from Tatum and Jaylen Brown out of double teams, make quick decisions, pass and drive against a rotating or zone defense, and make the other team pay for those decisions, then the defense will continue to double team Tatum and Brown.
“At times, as simple as it sounds, it comes down to making some open shots,” Udoka said. “And they dared some guys to make and took it out of (Tatum’s) hands, and we didn't didn't make them pay.”
It’s the same old story for the Celtics. And if everything you’ve read up until this point sounds familiar, it’s because it’s exactly what I’ve written about them already. Before this paragraph, all but a handful of words (besides the quotes, which were all from this game) were cut and pasted from prior stories about Celtics collapses.
I walked into the TD Garden media room after the game and a Celtics employee said “good luck writing about this game.” I joked with another reporter that I was going to cut and paste an old article and he said “you probably could.”
He was right.
The lead-ins to the same old quotes still worked. The issues with the zone are still there. The fourth-quarter meltdowns are still happening.
Every time Tatum comes out of the game, he goes and sits on the stationary bike to stay warm. Maybe the Celtics should replace it with a hamster wheel because that would at least be more appropriate for how this season is going. For all the progress this team seems to make from time to time, they are still right here, doing and saying the same old thing.
"We just failed to execute a couple of things. Just mental errors on our part as a team,” Romeo Langford said. “Just gotta go back, look at the film and see exactly what happened. All we can do now is try not to let that happen in the future."
There is no future. We’re all Dennis Hopper watching looped security footage in Speed. It’s just the same thing over and over again. There's just no reason to believe anything they say or do.
