No one in the Celtics locker room wants to read this column. No one on that team plane is interested in what I’m about to say, because players and coaches don’t want to hear about moral victories.
And there are certainly some of you who don’t want to hear about it either. One of the beauties of sports is that there are winners and losers, and the delineation is clear. One team has more points on the board than the other, and is thus the winner. The other team is the loser. Good night, thanks for coming, shut the lights off on the way out.
This is true of all games, even this one that I’m about to praise. We can go through this game and pick apart plays where things went wrong to find out how they can be done better. The players involved shouldn’t come away from this game feeling like I do. They should be pissed off about the mistakes they made and those should sting when they see them again in the film session.
At the same time, I can hardly expect the group of Celtics out there to do much better under the circumstances.
If this game played out the same way with the normal group of players out there, the tone of all this would be much different. If Jaylen Brown slipped and turned it over at the end of the game, we’d be having a different discussion.
Critiques like this are based on expectations. I expect a lot out of Brown and Jayson Tatum, because they're both All-Stars and, possibly, All-NBA players. If Al Horford missed a screen or made a panicked play with the ball under tight circumstances, I’d wonder why a guy with that much experience got so frazzled.
But the overtime featured Derrick White, Malcolm Brogdon, Grant Williams, Mike Muscala, and Sam Hauser -- a lineup we may never see again unless the game is decided. Hauser was getting DNPs just a few weeks ago, and he’s on the floor with a guy who probably has food spoiling in a fridge in Oklahoma City right now. The next time these two teams meet, it’s possible none of these guys would be floor for the Celtics in that situation.
“There are some plays down the stretch we want back,” White said after the loss. “But every time we step out there, we feel like we have a good enough team to win no matter against who. So it’s hard to say a moral victory, but it's a tough one.”
It can be both. I think we can look at that stretch run and pick it apart in hopes of these guys getting better while also understanding that we probably couldn't expect them to do much better.
This team played pretty well for most of the game. If the full-strength Celtics play with the level of focus and intensity that these guys did every game, they could probably win 60 games.
“We were detailed, focused, effort, did all the right thing to win,” Joe Mazzulla said. “They made a couple more plays than we did down the stretch. But that was two great teams playing against each other, regardless of who’s in or who’s out.”
And this is where the real victory comes into play for Boston.
When the Bucks face the Celtics again, whether it’s at the end of the regular season or in the playoffs, they can look at the Boston bench and remember that there are some guys there that they have to take seriously.
Hauser hit the game-tying 3-pointer right in Khris Middleton’s face, which is something guys tend to remember. If he’s on the floor in a late-game situation, not only has he proven to Mazzulla that he can hit a shot in the clutch, he’s proven it to the Milwaukee Bucks. That's something they’ll have to account for.
Mike Muscala, before he lost his legs because he’d played six more minutes than his previous career-high, proved that he needs to be defended if he’s on the floor or else he’ll gladly rain down 3-pointers (and apparently dunk on people and earn a tech for yelling at the ref).
Derrick White has shown, beyond just this game, that he can handle a much bigger burden than 20 bench minutes if needed. He picked the Bucks apart for much of the game and has hit killer shots over his Player of the Week stretch. Would Milwaukee really choose to double off him after all this?
And not only did those guys prove something to the Bucks. They proved it to their teammates as well. Tatum and Brown can say they trust these guys, but the performances they’ve seen recently show that if double teams come their way, getting off the ball and giving it to them is a really smart option. Teams can really be punished for over-committing on any one guy.
Maybe some of this stuff was already felt in the locker room, and maybe some people around the league believed some of it by this point, but this type of game where they were only beaten by an outlier shooting night by Jrue Holiday hammers home some pretty important points about the Celtics.
This team is full of really good basketball players.
“I think it's good for Joe, knowing that he has a lot of guys that have shown that they can play in big games and in crucial situations,” Hauser said. “ And if he gets in a pinch, he can throw guys in there. It just goes to show how deep our team is, and that's a good problem for a coach to have.”
It’s also good for everyone else to know it too. Sometimes you need a game like this to prove the point.
That seems like a win to me.