One line I remember writing a lot over the past couple of seasons is some variations of how the Celtics can’t seem to handle success.
Tough time for that chestnut to show up again.
The Celtics had this game in the palm of their hands. When Payton Pritchard made a baseline cut and hit a fadeway in the lane, it felt like everything was going Boston’s way. The script was being followed to the letter. Boston was running away with the game in the fourth quarter, ready to take control of this series.
“They started switching and kept us in front of them, myself included settling for some 3s and things like that instead of driving and attacking,” Jayson Tatum admitted after the Game 5 loss. “We moved the ball pretty well throughout the game, but that last six some-odd minutes we got stagnant and just made it tough on ourselves.”
Boston shot 3-11 over the final eight minutes of the game. For a team that had figured out how to attack the Bucks' defense and scored 42 points in the paint to that point, the Celtics suddenly abandoned their attack and only scored once more in the lane. The Bucks' switching sent the Celtics into passive mode and the Celtics never recovered.
The story after this game will be about Milwaukee making all the plays to win this game, but they also made a lot of plays that should have lost them the game as well. They went into the penalty with 6:48 left in the game with Boston up 6. Jaylen Brown split a pair of free throws, and Boston didn’t go to the line again until the :31 mark.
Gifted with a chance to be aggressive, force the issue, and put the game away at the line, Boston chose the passive path.
Milwaukee also missed plenty of shots over that same eight-minute stretch. They were 7-17, good for only 41%. It’s not like the Bucks closed this game with some furious stretch of imposing their will against an overmatched Boston team. They missed more shots than Boston did. It’s just that they kept getting more second chances.
"Offensive rebounds really. The story of the game,” Ime Udoka said. “Especially on those specific plays where they got kick-out 3s. Some were long rebounds that were a little bit tougher. We gotta find bodies on those and free throw one stands out."
Oh, the free throw one. That's the Basketball Gods at work.
I think most players understand a simple rule when it comes to basketball: Play hard and play the right way, and you’ll generally get rewarded when it’s time for luck to decide something on the court. Mess around and the luck will go the other way.
By the time Giannis Antetokounmpo was taking his prolonged free throw routine, the Celtics had already put themselves in a position to fall victim to a weird bounce.
All they needed to do was get the rebound. Two guys had a bead on it.
Neither of them got it.
“Two guys going after the ball, and oh well. It just happens. It’s out of our control,” Marcus Smart said. “Me and JB ran into each other, and (Bobby) Portis is in the right spot at the right time. It lands in his lap, and he just lays it up. It happens, but we shouldn’t even be in that situation to where even if he lays it up off of that, to make it a game. Just fell apart execution-wise down the stretch, and it hurt us.”
The first half of this season was about breaking bad habits, but it turns out the Celtics are still prone to a few. When things seemed to be in the bag, they tried to do things on their own rather than as a team. When things started to get out of control because of it, they tried to answer rather than get back to what worked. When they needed to execute, they weren’t on the same page.
They had one more chance on the final play of the game, but the play fell apart before Derrick White could even inbound the ball. Udoka yelled from the sideline to Tatum and Horford as Smart freelanced on the other side of the floor. There were at least two or three things that were supposed to happen that didn’t, and the play ended with Jrue Holiday, the guy who was supposed to be too tired in the fourth quarter, making a spectacular defensive play to seal the game.
Boston came out of this game still confident in their chances. After all, they preached, two of their three losses were mostly their own fault. If they can just stop making these mistakes, they’ll still be alright.
In a sense, they're not wrong. The losses in Games 3 and 5 are mostly self-inflicted. Clean some things up, respond like they’ve responded over the past few months, and the bull gang will have to set up the parquet at least one more time.
In another sense, though, they're horribly off base. Because they're facing the champs, with Giannis Antetokounmpo, in their gym. There's too much left to chance now. They have to basically be perfect to pull this off now.
“We talked about showing our resolve and we made it tougher on ourselves now,” Udoka said. “It'll make it sweeter when we bounce back. But we gave up a golden opportunity tonight."