Some teams can get away with messing around. Larry Bird once played a game mostly left-handed because he was bored and only switched back to his right to actually get the win.
Bird would probably be eviscerated on social media and the screaming head debate shows if he pulled that move today. No one on the Celtics has the luxury of paying homage to the Legend to find out if that's actually true.
The Celtics spent about eight minutes in Chicago Monday night showing what they can be at their best. They spent most of the remaining 40 showing what they are at their worst, and reminding everyone, including themselves, that there isn’t much room for messing around.
That's probably true of every team in the league. The NBA’s best teams all have flaws that are hard to overcome when the full effort isn’t there. That will make for some frustrating nights across the association, much like this one frustrated the Celtics.
“I think we kind of let our offense dictate our defense,” Jayson Tatum said after the loss. “We was getting great looks in the second quarter, we were missing a lot of shots, and it was kind of like a snowball effect.”
The Celtics were impressive earlier this week when they caught themselves from falling into that trap. This time around, they seemed to get too comfortable when things came too easy for them to start the game. And that's really where the lesson in this game lies.
The Celtics had 10 assists on their first 10 baskets, and only three unassisted buckets in the first quarter. They had 11 assists in the first quarter and 15 the rest of the way. After almost half of their shot attempts resulted in an assisted basket in the first quarter, only 19.7% of their shots turned into assisted buckets the rest of the way.
How does that happen?
The cuts to the basket that made the first quarter so enjoyable disappeared. The ball movement that created these opportunities went with it, and we were left with a bunch of guys who reverted back to trying to bail out their teammates on their own, rather than work together to figure it out.
“You can't get bored doing the right thing over and over again,” Joe Mazzulla said after the game. “Whether that's on offense, making the right play, whether it's on defense continuing to get stopped regardless of what's going on. And so we just kind of focus on hammering away at that. We gotta do it every single time.”
Mazzulla doesn’t say much, so calling out his guys for getting bored with the details is about as damning a comment as you’ll hear all season.
But it’s also the kind of thing that needs to be said because as much as these guys have grown over the years, there's still a propensity for them to fall back into some of the things they used to do. This kind of performance is one example, and it’s the type of thing Mazzulla needs to keep in check.
He’s the details guy. Mazzulla is the guy who believes in good days turning into good weeks, and then good months, and then a good season. And even though bad days will find every team, they shouldn’t find a team in the midst of a game where they were doing things right.
Those first few minutes of basketball looked so good, but they fell into a 3-point trap after an early barrage of assisted triples gave way to more isolation or quick-shot attempts. The team got so hot early that they thought it would just carry them through.
But when the attempts started to rim out and the Bulls started to make theirs, the Celtics got further away from what had been working, and that just can’t be their reaction.
The Celtics can play a gorgeous brand of basketball if they want to, but they have to want to. They can’t just summon it, no matter how brilliant Tatum or Jaylen Brown can be. Sure, one of them can get hot and carry the C’s past rough spells, but the default setting on this team needs to be ball movement, cutting, and easy baskets above all else.
Because when they do that, the first quarter of this game is the result. When they don’t, you get the final three quarters of the game.
This team has so much to figure out without Robert Williams that they can’t let themselves cave like they did in Chicago. They have so much to work on defensively to survive the next couple of months or so that their offense can’t disappear like it did.
This road is too tough for losses like this one. Losses will happen along the way, but blowing games like this is too costly in a year like this.
When the Celtics play for each other, move the ball, and cut, they can snap out of just about any funk. When they don’t, these are the nights they're going to get. They have to accept this as fact, and understand that every lapse like this moving forward will end the same way.
