The 3-point happy Celtics needed something, anything, to fall. Conventional wisdom says when that's the case, get to the rim.
Marcus Smart did that with the Celtics down 18 with 7:50 to go in the third quarter. He got to the paint, threw an upfake, went to the open side of the rim, and spun it off the backboard. The move was beautiful, and it was exactly what the Celtics needed in that moment.
And then the ball rolled out.
Smart’s frustration seemed to sink him into an invisible chair. Even when the Celtics did something right, it went wrong -- not that the Celtics did much right in this game. Every time the Celtics seemed to give us the “well, maybe there's time to turn this around” kind of run, they immediately erased that hope.
“We turned the ball over a few times,” Malcolm Brogdon said after the loss. “We were getting good shots, we were playing with pace, we were getting stops, but we turned the ball over and they got, I think, easy dunks. They weren't even just transition layups. They were dunks, and that killed our momentum, I think.”
Boston has only lost twice in regulation this season, and both of those have come in the city of Chicago. This time around, the Bulls were seemingly in disarray. Zach LaVine had just gotten benched down the stretch of a tough loss, and his public comments made it seem like there was friction between him and head coach Billy Donovan. They’d lost four straight.
It seemed like they were fresh meat for Celtics, who had been feasting for a couple of weeks. Turns out, it was bait for a trap game.
“We should have known a little bit better that they haven't felt great recently,” Jayson Tatum admitted. “They were -- not desperate -- but they came out and played like they really wanted to win.”
The wanting part is also the frustrating part, because you’ll read that quote and probably think “why didn’t you really want to win, Jayson?” And it’s a valid question. It’s not as if any professional athlete is happy to lose games, and the Celtics certainly wanted to win the game.
Winning isn’t about just showing up and announcing oneself because you never know which night your Apollo Creed act will end up in a matchup with Ivan Drago. The Bulls might have been struggling, but the Celtics' soft defense let guys who had lost confidence find it again.
Patrick Williams was dared to shoot and he made one. By the end of the game, Bulls Twitter was proclaiming it the best game of his career. LaVine came off a 1-14 game and could have been a villain to Bulls fans. He finished the game with highlight dunks, loud roars from the crowd, and a 3-pointer at the end of the game that might have been an expletive tossed that the Celtics, his own coach, or both.
The Celtics? They let too much of it happen because they seemed to be content winning a shootout. They took 50 3-pointers and 37 2-pointers. They ended up making 46% of them in the second half, but they opened the game 5-17 in the first quarter
“We rely on that, and I think we need more balance, especially those 3s aren't falling, if we’re not making shots out there,” Brogdon said. “We got to be able to play inside the arc and still defend for sure. That's one thing that can't slip regardless of how we're shooting the ball on the offensive end.”
Joe Mazzulla echoed that, saying he “thought throughout the year, when shots weren’t falling, we've done a great job of continuing to play. I thought tonight we just kind of just waned a little bit.”
You hear the cliche’ about any team winning on any given night, and that usually happens when the team that's supposed to win relaxes and wanes a little too much. The nine-game winning streak has been enough to give the Celtics the best record in the league, even after a stinker like this one. Nine game streaks are unusual, and they're that for a reason.
Because every win a team gets brings them one step closer to forgetting how the streak started in the first place. Each win can envelope players in a warm and fuzzy world that brings them further from reality. Everything is great and fun, until a game like this comes along to provide the record scratch moment.
For the Celtics, the wake up call is welcome.
“There's definitely a silver lining,” Brogdon said. “We're going home, we're about to play Dallas, a really, really good team. That was definitely a good game to -- I don't wanna say to lose, but a good game to reset us and have us refocus going back home and understanding we have a target on our back every night and teams are gonna give us their best basketball.”
