Karalis: It wasn't their best night, but it might be Boston's best chance so far to learn an important lesson

Sometimes the worst thing that can happen to a team is things going easy early in games. 

The Celtics actually came out fairly strong against the Raptors. Their defense wasn’t its best right away, but the offense was generating good looks. When Pascal Siakam hit the bench with his third foul in the second quarter, the Celtics really started to flow on both ends, building a 16-point lead. 

Things looked good.

Too good. 

Maybe they expected the Raptors to lay down. Maybe they thought the good times would just keep rolling. Neither of those things happened. 

“We kind of sucked tonight,” Jaylen Brown said after the game. “We didn't play our best, but we figured out how to win anyway. We didn't make a lot of shots. Defensively, we let them score a lot in transition. We knew that before the game that they were going to try to push and score in transition and we let them get a lot of transition points tonight. So I think we didn't play our best game but we still found a way to win.”

Finding a way to win games like this is actually part of what makes a great team great. There might be a dozen of these kinds of games over the course of the season where the Celtics will play well and let up, or maybe never play well at all. And as we continue to compare this year to last, this easily would have been one of those games Boston biffed down the stretch. 

But instead of the Jay and Jay turnover two-step with Brown and Jayson Tatum, the Celtics closed the game with the other guys. The big guns hit three fourth-quarter baskets for six points. Kristaps Porzingis, Jrue Holiday, and Derrick White doubled their scoring output.

“Of course we want to get the ball in JB’s and JT’s hands, but if we have something else to go to, boom,” Porzingis said. “Smaller guards in a pick and roll with me and see what they do. If they switch we can make them pay there, or if they switch and have a five on one of these guys, they are gonna make them pay also. So it's just more options, more weapons, and we took advantage of that tonight.”

The key for the Celtics in the Tatum and Brown era has always been trust. It has always been a question of those two stars, for all the greatness they possess, being too trustful of themselves and not trustful enough of their teammates. Sometimes the way to build that trust is out of sheer necessity. 

“Success looks different,” Joe Mazzulla said. “Tonight it was, like, how can we attack the matchup and it was the Jrue/KP pick and roll when we needed it most. And it says a lot about Jaylen and Jayson, it says a lot about our team. And you have Jrue to KP and D White kind of bring us home, and so that's going to happen. We're going to need all those guys.” 

It also says a lot about Mazzulla’s hold on his team. Let’s be honest, here. That Holiday/Porzingis pick and roll to take advantage of switches got Boston not only their biggest bucket of the game, but the exact kind of score the Celtics talked about when they traded for Porzingis. 

Late in the game … offense isn’t particularly fluid … a lot of attention being paid to the best players. Find Porzingis in the post against a smaller guy and let him do his thing. 

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Say what you will, but it take stones from a coach to decide to run plays that don’t involve the two best players when they're down two with about a minute to go. 

“Joe is a great leader for us,” Porzingis said. “He always finds the way to get to the player, in a way that that it actually gets you in a positive way, or a challenging way, and we respond well to his words. He's charismatic. … he knows how to push us.”

The whole world knows Tatum and Brown are going to be closers, but a game like this can let everyone know, including those two players, that Boston is quite capable of closing with others if need be. 

When Holiday dribbled up the right side, he decided to attack the baseline, which drew two defenders. Boston’s offense is about creating mismatches, and suddenly Boston had one without involving either of the Jays. Then Holiday saw Brown cutting towards him, causing a big reaction from Siakam. Brown’s gravity exacerbated the mismatch. 

Sure, Holiday could have given the ball to Brown for a midrange jumper. But White was all alone. 

If that doesn’t earn their trust, it’s hard to imagine what will. The Celtics played one of their worst games of the early season, and once again it’s the other guys who stepped up to get the job done. 

“We're fortunate enough to come out with a win, but we were able to learn a lot and feel a lot of the things that we haven't felt yet as a team,” Mazzulla said. “We're just able to learn a lot of things and simulate a lot of things that we haven't been able to simulate yet, so we're lucky to win. But if we don't learn the things that we learned, it's not going to help us.”