PHILADELPHIA -- Every game the Celtics play is a fight between their potential and their flaws.
Their potential makes them “Ecce Homo” by Elias Garcia Martinez.
Centre de Estudios Borjanos
Their flaws make them the post ‘restoration’ version.
(CESAR MANSO/AFP/GettyImages)
The elderly member of the Santuario de Misericodia church in Spain didn't mean to mess up this masterpiece. She truly wanted the restoration to go well. It just … got out of hand.
The Celtics don’t mean to botch these late game situations, either. They truly wanted to win this game and go home up 3-1. It just … got out of hand.
Jaylen Brown’s decision to double-team Joel Embiid with 22 seconds to go in overtime and a two point lead was well-meaning enough. All Boston needed was one more play to seal this win and run out the Wells Fargo Center with a win that would have ruined everyone’s week in Philadelphia.
And hey, Embiid isn’t great with double teams, so it seemed like a calculated risk.
“He got so far in the paint that I felt like Jaylen Brown wanted to help,” James Harden said. “Joel made an unbelievable pass. Then catch and shoot.”
Jayson Tatum never ends up guarding Embiid, but he ended up switching onto the big man. Maybe that's why Brown made what he called a “bad read” and left a guy who was 5-8 from deep; a former MVP who dropped 45 on them in Game 1.
“We wanted to not give up any 3s and not foul. If they scored a 2, we're fine,” Tatum said. “But things like that happen over the course of the game."
It's pretty tough to come out of a timeout where they were told not to give up any 3-pointers, only to give up a 3-pointer. These guys are NBA players. They should know time, score, and situation on their own, and then not make these kinds of mistakes right after they're reinforced.
But that's these Celtics sometimes.
After the 3 fell, the Celtics brought the ball up without using a timeout. Two main reasons Joe Mazzulla doesn’t call a timeout there are because he likes the matchups and he trusts his guys.
I understand the first part of that. With Harden and Tyrese Maxey on the floor, Boston didn't want to give Doc Rivers the opportunity to sub in better defenders. That makes sense.
I don’t understand the latter, because it’s getting harder and harder to trust that these guys can do this without some extra help.
“We just had to play with a little bit more pace,” Mazzulla said afterwards. “We had the right matchup. Jayson got downhill and made the right play at the rim. We just had to play with a little bit more pace there.”
They jogged the ball up the floor and didn’t get it over until there were 12 seconds left.
With 11, Tatum was motioning to Brown to stay in the corner.
With 10, Tatum was still walking to his spot.
With 9, Tatum finally made himself available for the pass.
With 8, then 7, Tatum spun and faced the basket.
By this time Boston had committed to either winning or losing this game. They left themselves no margin for error, which is typical. They weren’t going to give themselves time for an offensive rebound. They weren’t going to give themselves a chance to foul if they missed and get another crack at it.
Down to 6 and Tatum waved Marcus Smart away.
At 5 he got the screen he wanted and it was clear he wanted to win the game.
At 4 … 3 … 2 … Tatum wasted every option he had. He didn’t give it to Derrick White, who was all alone at the top of the key. He didn’t rise up for a shot.
With 1.5 on the clock and his momentum taking him the other way, he floated a pass to Smart that was just soft and off enough to take up all the remaining time.
“We were just trying to get the right guys in the right spot. We just went a little slower than expected,” Smart said. “We wanted to go really fast. They did a good job of getting their guys on the right people and making a play. We just have to see what’s going on, see the time and we have to understand time and management.”
This is on everyone. This still feels like a group that means well but still has competing views of how things should be done. Tatum is the big star so he wants the big star moments to win the game for his team. But Brown is a star too. Why isn’t he more involved?
Smart is the point guard but the ball is always in Tatum’s hands to create at the end. Sometimes it works, like in Game 3. Sometimes the Celtics play into their opponents’ hands by having Smart shoot the ball with regulation and overtime expiring.
Mazzulla wants his guys to figure things out on their own, but when they're not figuring it out he refuses to intervene. At some point as they were waving and gesturing and meandering, Mazzulla probably should have bit the bullet and said ‘matchups be damned, we’re wasting too much time so let’s set something up.’
They mean well. They really do. They aren’t trying to mess this up. It’s just that the potential of this team isn’t always enough to cover up their flaws. There isn’t enough concealer in the bottle to cover up the imperfections of a team that's so close to being dominant.
They worked really hard to overcome their slow start. They really made an impressive run in the fourth quarter. They were right there with the game in hand in overtime.
Sometimes the flaws are too much to overcome. The only hope is that after a game like this, the potential will grow for having learned from the mistakes. For what it’s worth, Horford is coming out of this game feeling better about things than any of us.
“Just the way that we responded that fourth quarter I thought was great,” he said. “Our focus, our will. I know that everybody’s feeling down. We lost the game and things like that. I’m pretty encouraged by our group. I saw something. I saw some growth in our group, things we haven’t been able to do all year, and be able to do them tonight on this type of stage. I’m very encouraged for our group.”
Flaws won out in Game 4. If Horford’s right, potential can still finish out this series.