“I thought we got off to a really good start.”
When Joe Mazzulla said that after the Celtics' loss to the Phoenix Suns, it probably stood out as faux coach praise designed to deflect too much blame toward his team. But Mazzulla was actually right on the money.
The Celtics did start out well, at least on one end of the floor. In fact, the first quarter of this game gave Boston the same opportunities they got against the Brooklyn Nets. Except this time around, instead of aggressively pursuing those chances, the Celtics played passive.
Brooklyn missed 10 of their first 11 shots against the Celtics, leading to a 27-4 deficit. The Suns missed 9 of their first 11 shots against Boston and were only down 7-4.
Here’s the difference. After all those Brooklyn misses, Boston went dunk, layup, 3, putback, layup, 3, dunk, putback, 3, 3 to get to 27 points.
After Phoenix’s misses? Missed 3, missed 3, missed 3, missed 3, missed layup, made mid-range jumper, missed midrange jumper, missed layup.
In one game they were aggressive, in the other they settled for 3-pointers. The difference between the two games was a two before the seven, and when you miss opportunities like that early in a game, it’s hard to get them back later.
“We didn't shoot the ball well tonight,” Mazzula said. “We missed some good shots. And then once we missed them and had empty possessions and got down, it kind of put some pressure on our offense and then we just didn't do a great job of executing.”
This, like a lot of other games we’ve seen recently, smacked of a ‘we just proved our point two nights ago, so we’re just going to chill in this one.’ Of course, it’s a little different because of the personnel on the floor and the way Phoenix played defensively. The Celtics tend to struggle against switches backed up by a rim protector, and the perimeter defenders the Suns threw at Boston were miles better than Brooklyn’s.
Still, the Celtics didn’t do the hard work necessary to break that down, choosing instead to fire over the top of the defense rather than get into the heart of it and break it down. There weren’t really any post-ups to get any paint touches. There weren’t any real cuts, not even the sacrificial cuts from one side of the floor to the other to open up driving lanes for teammates. The few times they actually managed an attack and a cut, this happened:
“We’ve got to be able to get up for games, and come out and match up with a team’s energy, and tonight, we just didn’t have it,” Jaylen Brown said. “We played well in stretches, but we just played way too slow. They got way more shots than us, and they dictated the game. I think we could have ran a lot more, played a little bit faster, got some more shots, but that didn’t happen tonight.”
It’s actually amazing that the Celtics were able to still find themselves within striking distance late in the game. They had the Suns lead down to six a couple of times in the fourth, but by then the Basketball Gods had determined that Boston didn’t deserve to win the game. At 96-90, Al Horford missed a 3, Dario Saric made one, Brown missed one, and DeAndre Ayton put back a Chris Paul miss and it was suddenly an 11-point game.
That was the story of the night for Boston: Slack, get punished for it, work really hard to come back, miss, and watch the Suns whip off a big run. It didn’t matter that they were missing four key guys, including Devin Booker.
“You got a team that gets confidence like that and then it's tough to slow them down,” Horford said. “At the end of the day, they're professionals and … we need to do a better job with that. Despite who's on that other side, there's a certain level that we need to play with.
Horford admitted that it was “fair to say” there was a mental letdown after demolishing the Nets Wednesday night. Those are going to happen, but sometimes it’d be nice if it wasn’t so blatant. It’d be nice to show that, after seeing how hard work paid off in fourth quarter rest against Brooklyn, that they would want that same reward this time around.
Nope.
“Every game has its own story,” Brown said. “We just didn’t get enough tonight, and we just got to be better going forward. We gotta find ways. As a leader, I gotta find ways to help get my team going. Spark a little bit. The spark wasn’t there, and Phoenix seemed like they wanted it more than us, and they came out and won. It just seemed like we was going through the motions. And when that happens, everything becomes more pressure. We should just be playing, flying around, but we took our foot off the gas.”
