There is nothing quite like the Wells Fargo Center before a Celtics game. It’s LOUD in there. The energy is electric.
Those fans hate Boston so much.
One thing basketball players love to do is shut up a hostile road crowd. That environment is programmed to be as loud as possible for as long as possible when a rival steps onto the court. Shutting up a crowd like that is *chef’s kiss* perfection.
Earlier this season, Ime Udoka said that used to be his favorite feeling too. Now that he’s a coach, it’s fair to wonder if the feeling was the same.
“Yes,” he said bluntly when asked the question, drawing some giggles from those in the room. “I think honestly, for myself and the group, I've always said that it's gonna build character with our group to play in these environments. So I did say that as a player, but as a coach, it's no different. And to see the crowd leave in probably the third quarter is an impressive thing for us and I think our team relished that.”
This is a far cry from the Celtics we were talking about a month or so ago. The headline on the January 7 game report was “Lack of composure, bad closing lineups continue to kill Celtics.” On December 28, I wrote a column with the headline “Celtics keep telling us who they really are, and nothing will change until they do.”
Well…
“I don't know if they look like a different team, but they do move the ball, they play together, you see it,” Doc Rivers said after the loss to Boston. “It looks like they communicate a lot. I remember early in the year I think (Marcus) Smart went off about it, and it looks like they made that change.”
Something has changed, and it’s a little bit more than just getting healthy and whole (well, at least before Smart’s rolled ankle). They came in without Robert Williams in this game and they were still a buzzsaw against the Sixers. Having Daniel Theis helped, just like having Derrick White was a nice cushion to account for the loss of Smart, but those don’t equal 50 points worth of a difference between them and Philadelphia.
This team is thinking and playing differently.
“I do think that even simple stuff like myself or somebody get the rebound, just kicking the ball ahead. I think we've emphasized that a lot,” Jayson Tatum said. “Even if it don't always lead to transition or a fast break, just kick the ball ahead, put a little pressure on the defense, then we get set. And I think something as small as that that everybody has bought into, taught us to play with more pace and everybody can be just a little more involved.”
Hearing this from the Celtics, to me, is like someone in a New Mexico observatory sweeping the universe for signs of life and actually getting a signal. Something that seemed so impossible weeks ago is now a concept they seem to embrace. The coach has been trying to coax more passing out of this group since before everything became pumpkin spice, and now they're finally doing it.
“You can literally see the improvement of their ball movement. The old Boston is more isos, this Boston is driving and playing with each other,” Rivers said. “That's what makes them so much tougher. I think it makes Tatum and Brown even tougher when they move the ball like that.”
Wins one-through-six of this streak were dismissed out of hand by too many people who didn’t fully recognize how different the style of play was from their December doldrums. Those wins came against the bottom of the barrel, and so people didn’t even want to pay attention to why those wins were happening, much less why they’d been so dominant.
People wanted Boston to prove it. So they did.
“It feels good, because we definitely smoked some of these games in the past, being up big,” Jaylen Brown said. “So we want to be able to finish and find ways to win. It shows that we’re learning, that we’re growing, so we’ve just got to keep it up. One game at a time.”
You wanted a statement? Here it is. They walked into Philadelphia, the most hostile of environments, and sent the fans home before the concession stands shut down. They sent the MVP frontrunner home in a frustrated huff, skipping the media session and leaving his teammates to bear the brunt of the “what happened?” questions.
No, they didn’t have James Harden, but no excuses, right? That's what I kept hearing when I tried to explain why the losses were happening earlier this season. No matter who was out for Boston, the response was “no excuses,” so it should stand to reason that Boston’s opponents are held to that same standard.
Boston beat Denver, Atlanta, and Philadelphia and are now in the thick of the Eastern Conference race, just 3.5 games out of first. If we played the “if I told you at the start of the season” game, everyone would agree this is a perfectly fine position to be in. Striking distance of a surprising seed and in the mix for first-round home court is exactly where they should be.
They definitely took the scenic route. Clark Griswold would have taken a more direct path. But they are here, and they announced it very loudly and clearly on Tuesday night.
“I said from the start of the year, to have that road warrior mentality, it will help us as a group overall,” Udoka said. The fans streaming out of Wells Fargo without the energy to even boo the way they usually showed his Celtics are finally getting it.