If you’ve ever tried to convince someone you’re over that person when you’re clearly not, then you might understand how the Celtics looked in San Francisco on Saturday night.
They walked into the Chase Center sporting a full makeover. They had a shiny, new offense, a new man in charge, and a sporty new bench. They had grown into themselves, and everyone in town was impressed with how they took that disappointment the Warriors had caused and used it to become better and more confident.
Oh, but that other team, they have some sort of power, don’t they? The self-affirmation, the power of positive thought -- it goes away when they come around, doesn’t it? Suddenly, you don’t know if you’re trying too hard or not hard enough but all you know is that you’re blowing it right now and everyone can see you sweating through your shirt.
Okay, maybe that's a little dramatic, but that's certainly how the room feels as the Celtics leave the bay area with tucked tails once again. What we had all built up to be some big prove-it moment was less of an announcement to the world that things are different and more of a reminder that nothing is won in December.
Maybe we need the reminder more than they do.
“Tonight was probably more meaningful to you guys than it was for us,” Jayson Tatum told reporters after the game. “We want to win every game we play, for sure … to lose this one, especially the way we played was tough, but it’s not gonna dictate our season. We've had a great season so far, and we lost a game.”
It’s not that they lost the game, it’s how they lost that is driving people up a wall right now. It’s the offensive rebounds, turnovers, and leak-outs that led to easy Warriors baskets. It’s that Steph Curry was shimmying and running back down the floor before his shots actually went through the rim. It’s that Tatum had perhaps his worst game of the season on the biggest national stage since the Finals.
ABC Network games are a big deal because now everyone, even my 75-year-old mom who only has over-the-air TV, can watch. For a lot of people, this might be the first they’ve seen of the Celtics this season. For them, it’s like going to a Michelin star restaurant on a night where they burn the risotto and steak is dry.
Everyone expected this to be a great matchup. The Warriors might be scuffling a bit, but they're now 12-2 at home, so a good effort in the Chase Center shouldn’t be a surprise. If the Celtics and Warriors went at it like Rocky Balboa and Apollo Creed, they’d probably be fine with coming out on the short end of the stick. Can’t win ‘em all, right?
But losing like this? Yuck.
That was just tough to watch. In some spots, it was like watching a horror flick when you watch someone going to check on that noise upstairs. You’ve seen it before. You know how this is going to end.
“They played, honestly, a similar game to us -- switching a lot, making catches tough,” Malcolm Brogdon said. “Trying to funnel everything into an iso or into the bigs, a tough, contested two. I felt like we fell for the bait a little bit.”
The Celtics do like their bait when defenses switch. Jaylen Brown might have been the only guy out there who adjusted to the Warriors style and didn’t fall back into the trappings of the Finals. In June, Brown was the striper who saw the wriggling bunker on the hook and bit every time, handing the Warriors live ball turnovers and easy points. This time around, Brown stopped short of the rim, and instead relied on his mid-range mastery to be effective.
Tatum didn’t fare quite as well.
This was typical of his night. Head down, determined to make something happen, and failing. The right play, as it was for much of the Finals, was to pass it to Sam Hauser and trust him to do the right thing.
That was supposed to be the lesson everyone learned from the Finals. That was why Brad Stevens constructed the roster this way. That's what has been working for so much of this season.
Tatum is right and wrong about this game. He’s right that, ultimately, this is just one game. He’s also right that we, in our own heads, built this up to be something that it probably wasn’t … at least not to the level we’d built it up to be. This was not, in fact, a Finals rematch. That can only happen in the Finals. This was a game in December between two teams that had previously met in the Finals.
So in a lot of ways, we can’t blame these guys for not living up to something we hyped.
But any notion that this is just another game isn’t being honest with everyone because we all know how much that loss hurt. We all know that the lowest point in their professional lives came at the hands of that team. We all know that this meant a little more because of all that.
“I think we definitely played a little tense tonight,” Brown admitted after the game. “We played this game like we had it circled, almost, in a sense, for a long time instead of just playing our game -- coming out, playing the way we’ve been playing, moving the ball, making shots. We were a little tense and it kind of showed.”
Losing it in a similar way is a tough hit in an otherwise amazing season so far. The conversation around this team for a couple of days is going to be about how the Warriors have their number, which is hard to argue considering the result.
“It wasn’t a good feeling,” Brown said. “On top of that, it’s not a great feeling losing in this building. All of us are taking it a little harder than we probably should, but we bounce back. We get ready for the next one. We can’t let one game determine the outcome of the rest of the season. We lost tonight, but we got to be better.”