The Celtics played this game like 18-year-old me trying to drive to and from the clubs with the gas light on. They hit the gas hard right away, then let off and coasted for a long time, and then hit the gas hard at the end hoping to get where they needed to go.
It didn’t go well for me either.
But the Celtics aren’t some broke Newport Creamery dishwasher saving 10 bucks just in case he needs to pitch in on a late-night IHOP tab. They had a choice to make against the New York Knicks. They just chose poorly.
“Great teams know why they're good, and why they're good all the time,” Joe Mazzulla said after his team’s overtime loss to the Knicks. “We just can’t take possessions or time in the game for granted, and I didn't think we played consistently the entire game, physical, detailed, connected basketball. When we turned it on, we really did. And so we just have to do that all the time.”
I hate to tell you this, but that's hard to do in the NBA. It’s just tough for good teams who know they're going deep into the playoffs to give every ounce of effort every minute of every night when they know another game is coming around the corner.
Go ahead -- I’ll wait for you to yell about how much money they make or pride they should have in the comments. While you’re writing that, I’ll just use this space to remind people we have this discussion every year, especially around now, about every good team that does this with bad teams or teams deemed beneath them. I’ll also spend that time reiterating an answer to a comment by reminding people that the 1986 Celtics -- the buzzsaw, standard-bearer of all things great and holy about the Celtics franchise -- suffered nine of their 15 losses to teams below .500
And the Knicks are an above .500 team.
“I think human nature plays a part,” Jayson Tatum said of the flipping of switches. “I think coming out in the third quarter we could have done better to start the second half. We were a little flat. But basketball is just a game of runs. It’s the NBA. They’ve got talented guys, well-coached. They’re gonna make plays and make shots. It’s just a matter of answering them and not letting it snowball, like we did tonight.”
This is the hard part of being a good team. It’s the part of the year where you feel like you’ve proven a lot, you’ve played 50 games without much of a break, and you know that if you accomplish the goal you’ve set out for yourselves, you’re still not even at the halfway point.
Whether you’re making minimum wage scraping congealed caramel off a plate, middle glass making ends meet, or millions of dollars playing a game in front of 19,000 people a job can get tedious after a while. When human nature kicks in, it can produce some ugly results.
“Being a great team is really, really hard,” Mazzulla said. “You just have to work at it every single day, and you’ve just got to do the small, boring things all the time.”
That's not exactly something that's going on a plaque or anything. You’re not going to see Notre Dame take down their “play like a champion today” sign and replace it with “do the small, boring things.” If “do the small, boring things” was a campaign slogan, Mike Dukakis would have worn it while riding in that tank.
No one wants to do those things, and yet, they are absolutely necessary to winning. They are the connective tissue that binds all things on the court. They are proper screens, good spacing, and making correct reads to make a pass that might lead to a pass that might lead to another pass and then lead to a shot. They are boxing out so a teammate can rebound, or timing a double team correctly so someone else can get the steal.
All those little, boring things have to be done every day, and when they're not, this result is the risk.
“That's part of a season, and that also reflects leadership,” Jaylen Brown said. “It's a mentality. Having a tough mind. I think Joe talks about it all the time, having mental toughness, and after losing two games tonight would be a great game to show that, and we dropped the ball, and I dropped the ball, as a leader. I didn't give the energy needed to help my team win.”
These losses happen to every good team, and we on the outside are going to have to accept that as a reality. No amount of screaming slogans and finger-wagging is going to change the fact that guys get bored sometimes. Hell, Larry Bird got so bored once he played most of a game left-handed, and the Celtics won that game by just one point.
Imagine if Twitter or comments sections existed at that point. Imagine the evisceration Bird would have faced for forcing himself and his teammates to play more minutes just because he was bored and wanted to play lefty.
At the same time, it’s the team that does the hard things that buck the reality of human nature that become champions. It’s the team that does the things we can’t do, even if it’s finding the wherewithal to do the mundane when most guys are making their All-Star break vacation plans.
What the Celtics are going through right now is understandable. But at the same time, what they want to go through is exceptional. That old saying about dressing for the job you want and not the job you have applies to these guys.
If they want to be champions, they have to play like them, and that means finding a way to get through this little malaise. And to do that they have to get back to the basics they were finding their way to just a week ago. Because when you can do those things all the time, even when you absolutely don’t want to, then you get to play a lefty game every once in a while.
“Just doing the little things that work all the time,” Mazzulla said. “Sometimes that can be really hard over the long course of a season, and you just can’t get bored doing those things. They are very, very simple, and the simplest things breed the most reward on both ends. So you just can’t get bored with doing simple things.”