SAN FRANCISCO — When the Celtics went down 3-2 to the Milwaukee Bucks, Ime Udoka was surprisingly upbeat, talking about opportunities Boston had rather than focus on what could have been a crushing collapse to the defending champions.
That was not the Udoka who sat in front of the media in San Francisco. The person who sat at the podium was still heated from the loss. You could tell by how he walked in, and how his first few answers lacked a lot of the exposition he normally offers, and how he was looking for some of the same answers as the people sitting opposite him.
“Hard to explain that start,” Udoka said of the first quarter. I’ll be honest, I don’t think I’ve ever heard him use the phrase ‘hard to explain’ with us, much less use it so often.
“They took the fight to us a little bit early. We were struggling to finish in the paint. So that was pretty evident early on,” he continued. “Poor start overall. That's hard to explain that, why that is. But we got back in. Turnovers, missed free throws, some of the things obviously, a little bit talking to the refs too much didn't help us in the fourth. But the start is hard to explain. We were guarding well enough. They had 27. For the most part they had 19, 17, with a few minutes left, but our offense was stagnant, unaggressive.”
There is a lot about this Celtics team that's hard to explain. Why they continue to commit turnovers at this alarming rate is one of them.
“We're hard to beat when we don't turn the ball over,” Jayson Tatum said. “Clearly, we're easy to beat when we do turn the ball over.”
Why they continue to fall back into the bad habits of earlier this season is another.
“I think definitely we weren't as sharp as we needed to be during times there. Just tough,” Al Horford said. “Definitely now, our backs are against the wall, and we have to see what we're made of.”
We know what the Warriors are made of. They played their best overall game of the series and that was without a typical Steph Curry explosion. But they came out and dominated early. When they fell behind in the fourth, they kept hanging around rather than let the momentum sweep them away. When Boston started to show weakness, they pulled at the thread until the whole thing fell apart.
Boston? They spent their energy arguing with the officials.
“Yeah, not our best moment. As you guys know, I feel like we've been able to fend those things off, especially throughout the Playoffs. For whatever reason tonight I feel like it got to us,” Horford said. “It's one of those things that we kind of brought it back. We were able to focus back in, but we can never let that get to us. We can't let that affect our game, the way that things are being played.
“We feel like we can control a lot of those things. It's something that we have to move on from and be better on Thursday.”
The Larry O’Brien trophy will be in the TD Garden on Thursday. One of these teams knows what it takes to hold that over their heads. The other is learning some hard lessons about what it takes to get there.
One team has banners hanging overhead won by players on the floor. The other is playing under the shadows of the past, hoping to learn enough on the fly to overcome their worst instincts.
Udoka spent so much of the early part of this season trying to break these Celtics of their bad habits, and it looked like he’d done that with their turnaround and playoff run. The pressure of the Finals is different, though.
None of this is the same as anything they’ve been through. Their practice days are different, throwing off their routines. Their media obligations are more intense, drawing a lot more of their time and attention than ever before. Their warmups are different, forcing them to navigate through throngs of live shots and even a stage on the sideline.
When the excrement hits the spinning blades, it’s natural to retreat to one’s happy place, and Boston’s happy place is full of bad habits and bad decisions. It’s hard to do things the right way, the way that got them here, when everything else has gotten hard too.
Horford is right. We’re going to figure out what this team is really made of on Thursday.
“I ain't got no choice. We don't have no choice,” Jaylen Brown said. “It's win or go home at this point. We worked incredibly hard all season to put ourselves in this position. I still feel like we have so much more better basketball to play that we haven't played in the last two games.
“I'm hoping that the next two games we play Celtic basketball and put our best foot forward like I know we can. I know the city is going to be behind us. It's going to be a big Game 6. Looking forward to it.”
