I’m not sure Jayson Tatum realized just how much he was revealing with his postgame assessment of the team’s win over the San Antonio Spurs.
“Teams like that are dangerous, right?” Tatum told reporters. “When they're kind of playing carefree, the pace that they play at, they don't necessarily have an agenda. They just pass, cut, try to get the best shot, constant movement. And, a lot of times, regardless of the record, they might get up to play against us. Those can be kind of tougher teams to guard, especially if you come in underestimating them even a little bit. We knew from the jump, it was gonna be tough.”
We should start with giving the Spurs the credit they deserve for hanging tough and not going away. We all knew that a Gregg Popovich-coached team is going to go hard for 48 minutes, especially with a couple of recently former Celtics on the roster. Josh Richardson was trying really hard to get his revenge on Boston in a situation where revenge is actually justified.
I mean, he went from on the outs in Dallas to a real rotation player on a good team before he was dealt to the rebuilding Spurs, so if anyone has a right to be pissed off at a franchise, it’s Richardson. And he tried to bury his former team by being one of eight Spurs scoring in double digits and one of three who scored 18.
The Spurs seemed to be one shot away the entire second half, and it might have just been sheer luck (for both teams, really, considering a shot at drafting Victor Wembanyama might have been impacted by a win) that one shot never fell.
But Tatum’s revelatory quote gives us a closer look at why it is the Celtics have so much trouble with teams like the Spurs.
Bad teams tend to play more carefree, fast-paced games without agendas. The Celtics can play that way, too, when they put their own agendas aside. Just look at their first half shot chart:
There were passes, cuts, and efforts to get the best shot. They took 17 3-pointers and 32 2-pointers. Of the 2-pointers, only five came outside the paint. Of the shots in the paint, all but four came in the restricted area.
Then the second half began.
They took 17 3-pointers and 29 2-pointers. Of the 2-pointers, eight came outside the paint. Three shots in the paint came out of the restricted area.
To put it another way, in the first half, 44.9% of their shots came at the rim, while 39.1% did so in the second half.
They got away from what worked for a while and didn’t start getting back to it until they had to. Whether it was playing with an agenda like winning some kind of award or proving a point or earning a contract, the Celtics certainly have agendas they’d like to accomplish while trying to get wins. If they can win games and accomplish these other goals, then that's a double win for them. They're not alone in that. That's true of most teams.
Taking an opponent lightly in the same week they gave up 150 points and got blown out by the Thunder? Of course! Especially when they get up by 15 and start to hang the “Mission Accomplished” sign. Then they can start trying to throw the haymakers and hope to shoot their way to a win.
Hey, it’s the end of a long trip, guys are tired, I get it. Again, they're not alone. It happens every night. The Warriors just lost at home to the Magic. Charlotte went into Milwaukee last night and blew out the Bucks. If you think Boston is the only contender that has nights where they let up and barely eke out a win (or don’t win at all), then go check out the expanded standings and look at the records against teams below .500 and you’ll see Boston has one of the best records in the league against them.
The quality of the win doesn’t matter in the NBA. It matters to you, but only for now. The Celtics have 28 wins and are, again, the only team in the NBA to have won at least 70% of their games so far. There's no weight for good wins or bad wins in the standings, so however you want to classify this one is up to you.
“I'm actually glad the game went like that for us,” Joe Mazzulla said. “We needed a game like that to where it's back and forth … there's obviously a lot of stuff tactically that we can work on, but from a psychological mindset standpoint, I'm glad the game went the way it did.”
Messy games give coaches teaching points, and to get those in wins are welcome because winning is on everyone’s agenda. The Celtics will take this win and call it a good one because they were challenged by a team with nothing to lose and they pulled it out. We’ll look at this win and bemoan all the things they said they’d do but didn’t or the things they started to do but stopped.
A little fatigue and stat-hunting will mess with the game flow like that. If there's a plus side to all of this, it’s that these crappy scrappies like the Spurs don’t make the playoffs, and the motivation shifts once those series come around.
The Celtics won. It wasn’t pretty, and it certainly wasn’t entirely what we were looking for. Maybe if we adjust what we’re looking for, we can accept these kinds of wins the same way the team can.