Al Horford knows what’s going on.
Horford gets the ebbs and flows of a season as much as anyone in the league. He knows this group of guys inside and out. So his demeanor after a game like this is telling.
Unbothered Horford is quick with generally canned answers sprinkled with a bit of sincerity. Bothered Horford is deliberate and slow-paced. It’s as if he’s taking the time to build a dam in his brain so it doesn’t let out a torrent of brutal honesty.
The Celtics have fallen back into some of the same patterns we saw last season before, oddly enough, a brutal loss to the New York Knicks. They deviate from what had been working, building leads with good pace and ball movement and then bogging everything down by devolving into isolation. They go from looking great to looking horrible in a span of a couple of possessions.
So when I asked Horford after the game if there was pressure, with only 17 games left in the regular season, to turn this thing around after two terrible losses, he took his sweet time in choosing his words carefully.
“Yeah. I guess I would say that we're not locking in as much as we need to,” he said, taking 22 seconds to get that one sentence out. “This is the second time that we kind of have a lead, we feel good about it, a team makes a run and we just kind of let them back in the game. And throughout the season, you're gonna have adversity. And the character of our group, the kind of guys that we have, I feel pretty confident that we'll figure it out. Obviously, you don't want to drag this out.”
My stopwatch has that answer at 1:10. Go ahead and start a stopwatch on yourself and read that quote out loud at just a normal, casual pace.
What did that take you? 30 seconds?
The Celtics hitting a lull isn’t that big of a deal. Hell, they could turn this around in a week, snatch back first place, and we can chalk it all up as a weird blip in an otherwise great regular season.
Things happen, live and learn, blah blah blah, here’s the first-round matchup.
The Celtics lost by 10 and by 2 in their last two games, but it feels so much worse because those both could have easily been comfortable wins. The Celtics have, within the span of minutes, looked like juggernauts to looking like they forgot how to play basketball altogether. How can that be possible?
“That's a very fair analysis, and it is true. I don’t have that answer,” Horford said “It is frustrating - how you look so good on one end, and then on the other end, a complete opposite type of thing … all year, we’ve had a good mindset of good or bad, continuing to play through things, and for whatever reason, these past few games, we haven’t been like that, and it’s literally the last two games. Before that, I felt like we were on a good pace. So this is something that we need to be conscious of and need to be better and try to eliminate those bad runs. That’s the biggest thing.”
It feels like more than just eliminating runs. This feels like a step backwards. This feels like regression. This feels like the moment King Longshanks coughs for the first time in Braveheart and you know it’s foreshadowing something.
We’ve seen this all before. We saw it last season, and the season before that, and the season before that. I don’t know if the stink of the Kyrie Irving and Tristan Thompson stints has seeped back into the locker room like a dead mouse stuck in the wall. I don’t know if the old lessons of coasting through bits of the regular season when necessary have resurfaced.
Or maybe it’s the bad habits that were masked for a long time but now, with fatigue really starting to set in, they're starting to bubble up to the surface again.
“I think we've just hit a little rough patch, which is fine,” Jayson Tatum said. “We would like to win every game coming out of the break, but probably wasn't going to happen. We're still in a great position and we still got time to figure it out -- and we're going to. Some minor things, but we know what we're capable of."
This isn’t the time to be talking about capabilities. This is the time to be fine-tuning. This is the time to be focusing on the minor details, not trying to come up with big-picture solutions to problems. This is the time to be flexing some muscle and sending some messages to the rest of the league, not giving potential playoff opponents a ton of confidence.
There's time to get this cough checked. And honestly, it really could be nothing. But I don't like the looks of it one bit. Maybe the Knicks can be another wakeup call for this team, because they need one. If they don’t figure this out soon, they're at risk of wasting a golden opportunity.
“We've played pretty good basketball most of the year,” Horford said. “This is a time where you tighten up, you fix some of these things, some of these issues, or it goes the other way.”