A game like this isn’t really a big deal, generally speaking. Good teams play down, mess up, and blow games like this all the time. No one has a perfect record against sub-.500 teams.
But the Celtics don’t have the margin for error that many of these other teams do. They don’t get the same leeway as the Phoenix Suns or Milwaukee Bucks.
“We don't have the luxury to take a deep breath right now,” Marcus Smart said after the team beat the Brooklyn Nets Thursday. “As long as you go out there and give everything you got, nine times out of 10 it should work in your favor. We just have to go out there and continue to do our job and come out with wins for us.”
They were drawn into a rock fight against the Detroit Pistons, and they found a way to win. There are no style points in the standings, and the Pistons are finding their way (they beat the Charlotte Hornets tonight), so winning games like that is important.
So, too, is winning a game like this one against Indiana. While we all want perfection every time out, it’s very easy to see why a team would start slow on a back-to-back like this on the road. It happens every week in the NBA. Blocking out the frustration over the whistles, or lack of them, or more importantly the shots that seem to lick the entire rim before falling off, is a key part of growing into a great team.
"Obviously, missing takes a toll on people. No one's shooting to miss but we can't let that impact us,” Robert Williams said. “That's what we improved the most, I feel like not letting offense dictate our defense. I can't let that impact me. There's going to be nights like today, but that's when we gotta go down on the other end and buckle down even more."
Losses like this, in the long run, should be counted as lessons learned as a team grows from good, to great, to championship-level.
In the short term, though, there's no room for mistakes like this anymore. Not as we head into March. The November and December losses took that cushion away.
“It is a missed opportunity,” Ime Udoka said. “It felt like we weren't as sharp as we needed to be and so you look back at that of course as an opportunity because it's a team that had been struggling, going 1-4 in their past five. It's the NBA, back-to-backs and three in four nights, it doesn't matter, you have to come out and play the game. When we didn't start to guard, we held them down and got back in the game but like I said from the start, we weren't as sharp as we needed to be.”
On the surface, this is a game that happens. Indiana doesn’t shoot well, but they got hot. Indiana doesn’t defend well, but the Celtics settled for shots that didn’t fall. We can easily say the game would have been different if a few of Boston’s 3-pointers had just fallen.
Fans can usually pretend a game like this never happened. Players can get blasted in a film session by the coach and then move on to preparing for a tough March that begins with the Atlanta Hawks.
But because the Celtics have had too many of these games, there is scant goodwill amongst the masses. Every one of these losses is met with the side eye that wonders “wait, is this how it’s going to be again?”
And each loss like this gives the standings-watching competition cause to celebrate. The Toronto Raptors can send the Pacers an edible arrangement if we can later point to this loss as the reason why Toronto stole the sixth seed and Boston has to get ready for a play-in game.
I want to just blow this game off as something that happens, but it’s something that's happened too often for us to do that. Now, Tuesday’s game against Atlanta means just a little bit more. Everything is a little more magnified.
Someone stranded in the desert can’t afford to drop the canteen, because you never know which drop of water will be the last one you need to make it out.
“Everybody will chime in what they think, and that's fine,” Jaylen Brown said. “It's out of our control. But for us as a group, we try to keep the outside pressure outside and just come in and play basketball. Just hoop. Execute. Do your job well and just stay the course. And that's brought us into good moments in the season, even in the midst of adversity, so I look to do nothing other than that now. Just hoop, do what we do, breathe, play good basketball and we’ll be fine.”