First impressions are hard to shake. When you first meet someone and that person is a jerk, he’ll always be a jerk to you, no matter how much he comes around or other people vouch for him.
The Boston Celtics won their 40th game of the season on Wednesday night. It’s their fourth win in a row, 15th of their last 17 games, and 22nd in their last 27. They are one of only 10 NBA teams with 40 wins. They're 13 games above .500.
Still, there were a few lumps in throats in the third quarter of Boston’s win over the Charlotte Hornets. There were a few people surely warming up their keyboard fingers, ready to unleash a diatribe about how the Celtics haven't figured much out at all … or at the very least wonder if they haven't.
The Celtics? They felt like they had it the whole way.
“Competing at that level, that’s when it’s really fun,” Jayson Tatum said. “When the game is close, you going back and forth, and you come to a timeout and emotions are high, things like that, and we all just look at each other and, you know, everybody got that look in their eye that we’re gonna figure it out. And everybody gonna do what it takes. And when you win a game like that, especially on the road, that’s basketball.”
The Celtics are a confident bunch now, very much unbothered by the ebbs and flows of games. They are not here to win games based on our preconceived plans for how a game should go. They're just here to win games.
And they are.
“Composure was good,” Ime Udoka said. “It felt like they were trying to junk it up with a lot of zone, a lot of blitzing and hitting, a few non-conventional things and we kept our composure. We take it as a sign of respect that they’re guarding us this way, trying to take us out of our rhythm. We didn’t play our best in the first half, still had a four-point lead and we still guarded well enough, even though the offense wasn’t clicking. Didn’t play great, still had the lead, and obviously still had 115.”
Scoring 115 is nice. They finished with an offensive rating of 123, which is better than the best offense (Utah) is averaging this season, so that's even better. And that's pretty easy to do when you have a guy who nearly dropped his 50 points on consecutive nights.
“We talked about relying on our defense, but (it’s good) to always have a guy you can go to, put it in his hands and have him figure it out, not only the scoring aspect and the attention he draws and the wide open shots he gets for everyone else,” Udoka said. “Obviously he’s on quite a tear right now. He’s getting the matchups he wants and getting to the spots he wants, and getting the shots he wants. That’s a huge luxury to have when you have a guy who can do that. But the guys are feeding off him as well.”
This is where the confidence comes from now. Where they were once trying to figure things out, they are now simply finding ways to execute. Just like any of us trying something new, it took some time for these guys, especially Tatum, to fully understand what they were trying to do. Once they got it, things clicked.
“I think that's what's helped turn our season around,” Tatum said. “Defense and us playing the right way 95% of time. There are certain times you gotta take tough shots and things like that, but the majority of the game, playing the right way, the game rewards that.”
The Celtics walked out of the Spectrum Center feeling good about what they’d accomplished. They obviously didn’t play perfectly, and Charlotte had something to do with that. Obviously, Boston’s energy could have been better, and ideally there's a better focus for the full 48 minutes.
But unlike the team we first got to know, these little lapses aren’t killers. I’m not sitting here writing about unearned cockiness. This team has grown past that.
Jaylen Brown had an off night, but he found a way to give Boston good enough minutes to turn the game around in the third. Marcus Smart had shots he wanted to shoot, but he kept following the plan and it got him another nine assists (he’s averaging 8.8 in this four-game winning streak). Derrick White is still getting to know the system but he found his way into a great two-way night.
“You are seeing the numbers with Jayson but everyone else is contributing in their own way,” Udoka said. “He's making it easy on them but what I pointed out to the group is Derrick and Marcus, 17 assists and one turnover only so they are doing a great job finding guys, passing up good shots to get great ones for others. That's what it is going to take going forward. You can't rely on one guy, two guys to score all the points. We want to have an unselfish team that plays a good appealing brand of basketball and I think we are doing that. We are making the extra pass and getting guys wide open looks, that's all you can ask for.”
Tatum is the muscle right now, but it could be Brown who pops off for 40-plus on Friday night, and having that punch is enough to give any team confidence. That's the foundation of this whole thing, but they're parlaying that into a willingness by everyone to just make plays for each other.
Confidence comes from knowing you’ll be able figure things out, no matter what situation you’re in. It is built over time, like calloused hands gripping tools over and over. The Celtics have failed a lot this season, but within all of those failures were lessons that they actually learned and took to heart. Now those lessons have built a belief in themselves that they can find their way out of messy games that don’t go according to plan.
“I’ve always had faith in us,” Tatum said. “I just knew that would turn around at some point. It’s only a matter of time before we start hitting shots … I like where we at last 15 games or so. Keep playing the right way, keep building towards what we’re trying to do.”