There was a point in the fourth quarter of this Celtics win over Minnesota when I smiled.
I can’t pinpoint exactly when, but it was somewhere in the middle during one of Naz Reid’s many strong plays. It’s the moment when I thought to myself that this was the exact kind of fight this Celtics team needed at this moment.
We might have thought going into this game that they needed an easy, wire-to-wire blowout to reset things; a real palate cleanser to show they can be a dominant force in the league again.
But what they really needed was a slog like this one. They needed to face an opponent who really wanted to beat them and had the players capable of doing so. They needed to face a scorer like Anthony Edwards, an aggressive force like Reid, and a heady player who does all the right things like Kyle Anderson.
A game like this is kind of like the scene in Miracle when Herb Brooks lines his guys up on the ice and makes them skate over, and over, and over.
"You think you can win on talent alone? Gentlemen, you don't have enough talent to win on talent alone."
Again …
Again …
Again …
It's good that Anderson kept sneaking in for rebounds. It’s good that they made runs. And most importantly, it’s good that Boston’s shots didn’t fall.
They don’t need another hot shooting night masking their deficiencies. They need to face them. They need to get pissed off about it happening. And then they need to start taking it out on their opponents.
“Everything's cool when everything's fine, when everybody's hitting shots,” Jaylen Brown said after the win. “But when the boat is going down, who's gonna step up? Who's gonna be ready to go?”
Talk about your million dollar questions.
The Celtics are still a disjointed mess, but this game is easily the most promising since the loss to Brooklyn. The win over Portland was as much about the Blazers being terrible and the win over Atlanta had discouraging moments against a team dying to lose that game.
But this one was an actual punch in the mouth. This one required a real fight for a long time. It wasn’t pretty and they still made a lot of mistakes, but that's the whole point here.
“Honestly, just because we won doesn’t mean I feel that much better,” Joe Mazzulla said. “I thought we fouled too much in the third quarter and we gave up some timely offensive rebounds. And so I thought our physicality and competitive nature was about a 10, and we just have to continue to execute the margins, in clutch situations. We won most of them tonight, out-shooting them at the free throw line, turnovers, offensive rebounds. We just have to have timely execution on those margins.”
The Celtics are either going to build the callouses they need to stop losing their grip on these games, or they're going to fall apart under the pressure. The more they face games like this, the more they're going to have to make a choice about their futures. They are either going to get fed up and play better sooner, or they're going to get fed up and execute better down the stretch.
“Anytime adversity hits, those are the moments,” Brown said. “Those are the moments you look to. Those are the moments I look to. When everybody is feeling down, or the energy’s low, those are the moments where I'm like, ‘okay, let's get it going. Okay let’s come out and play. Okay, let’s play with a little more urgency.”
Experience is the best teacher, and the Celtics are getting a heavy dose of it right now. The timing of it sucks, but it’s something they have to face. They clearly have the talent to be one of the best teams in the NBA. They’ve shown that for a long stretch of the season. But that talent is only maximized under certain circumstances, and those circumstances are cultivated with a certain work ethic. They won't win on talent alone.
Experience is telling them that no matter what they think they’ve accomplished, it’s still not enough to allow them to coast to the finish line. There is still work to be done, and each game they have to fight through like this is a game that will either steel them for a title run, or it will break them.
“We got to start trending upwards towards this time of year. So this trip is important,” Brown said. “Guys are injured. Mentally, sometimes it's hard to get up for games, but you gotta make sure you come in every single night with a consistent effort.”
