Through the lowest points of their season, the Boston Celtics swore they’d turn things around. No matter how bad the losses, no matter how repetitive the issues, they’d say things like Jayson Tatum did after a November loss to the San Antonio Spurs in which they gave up a 15-0 game-ending run.
“We’re going to figure it out. I’m certain of it,” he said. “I know we’ve got a lot of guys in there that’s gonna compete, that’s gonna fight.”
No one would blame you for not believing them. Why would you? They gave you nothing, besides blind faith, to think any sort of sustained winning was coming.
“I think the reality is, we had a new staff, pretty much a new team and everybody would have liked for us to play like this out of the gate,” Tatum said after beating the Hawks Sunday afternoon. “We made efforts but the reality is things take time and obviously, there is a lot of losses where we wish we could have back and things we wish we could change. We were all just adjusting to something new, a whole new coaching staff, kind of a new brand of basketball a little bit.”
Being a prisoner of the moment can set you up for being blindsided in the NBA. The season is long. It comes with ebbs and flows in general, and those can be exacerbated by things like injuries. And no matter how much you scream “no excuses,” those injuries and COVID absences did play a role in all of this. A lot of things did.
“It's my fifth year now and there are certain parts of the season that are better than others,” Tatum said. “For whatever reason, it's just a long season and it goes like that. You realize there are certain parts where you kind of just click, things feel a little bit more natural and you can figure it out. It's showing lately.”
The Celtics got healthy at the right time. They built some confidence against the right opponents. And now, against a couple of good teams where they came out and struggled, the Celtics have figured out how to adjust and close strong.
“I think we took our lumps early finishing games, but the team has always responded well to being challenged. Even in the games we were losing, the way we were losing early,” Ime Udoka said. “I was always optimistic because we did build big leads with people in and out of the lineups. The team never stopped fighting or stopped playing the right way. We still continued to build leads and we got better as the season went on finishing games.”
The full health allowed for less compromise in their closing lineups. Now, with the addition of Derrick White and, soon, Daniel Theis, the Celtics have proven defensive options to get the stops necessary to hold off hard-charging opponents. Yes, they have to add some guys to the roster to fill out the back-end, but the Celtics rotation is mostly set.
“Now you add a few pieces and obviously winning breeds some of that confidence,” Udoka said. “I think guys have been gelling together well and we know the group we have going forward now. So I think we’re on a good streak right now and we always know we can buckle down and lock in where we need to defensively, and on the nights when shots aren’t falling we can grind it out, but if they are falling you see some of the results we had in the past five or so games.”
Eight-straight wins, sole control of the sixth seed, and an outside shot at fifth before the break might feel like a great time to crow about the progress they’ve made. There is certainly some feeling of vindication on the team where they can let us know we should have believed them when they told us they’d figure things out.
“You could say that. We definitely lost some games we felt like we shouldn’t have lost earlier in the season,” Jaylen Brown said. “Now we get the chance to play some of these teams again and we’re looking to pull out some wins.”
But they also understand that, while this is a nice run that gets them back into the Eastern Conference mix, it’s still a few wins in February. They really needed these wins, and it certainly changes the narrative around the team, but just like they wanted proper perspective when things were going poorly, they want it now, too.
“It’s like, we didn’t win a championship. Like today didn’t make or break the season,” Tatum said. “I’m gonna tell y’all I told y’all when we win a championship one day. But until then, main thing that matters is just the process of getting there.”