The best way to beat Steph Curry is to make sure he’s not in a position to beat you.
That's what makes this loss to the Warriors so frustrating. The Celtics had the opportunity to put enough space between them and Golden State to avoid Curry’s ridiculous shot making and goodnight celebration.
It’s easy to get caught up in what looks familiar rather than what’s different about this loss. Most notably, this wasn’t the typical turnover filled fourth quarter where the Celtics basically turn into Bill Paxton when he’s confronted by Arnold Schwarzenegger in True Lies. This wasn’t Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown running into the teeth of a defense, trying to do too much, and failing.
It wasn’t great, but it wasn’t that.
“I thought our offensive purpose, execution, as far as the right sets, the right spacing, what we were attacking (was good),” Joe Mazzulla said after the loss. “We just missed 20 layups, 41 threes, and allowed them to score in transition. They made more plays than we did towards the end of the game.”
Both sides have their valid points.
On the one hand, Boston shot the ball 114 times, 58 from 3. If the Celtics simply shoot their season averages from 2 and 3, they would have scored 133 points in regulation and celebrated a 12 point win. Obviously, that's not how it works, exactly, but the point stands. Better shooting wins this game.
On the other, Mazzulla has talked a lot about how they're supposed to find other ways to win these games where they shoot less than 30%. Good looks or not, they weren’t falling and there has to be another way to win.
Where this Celtics loss was similar to others is that they got away from what worked. The actual mechanics of this loss were different, but the overarching theme of it wasn’t. Boston did something that worked, they had opportunities to continue doing that, and they abandoned those principles too often.
“There’s probably 15 possessions during that game where it’s like ‘that can’t happen,’” Mazzulla said. “I thought our process was good for the majority of the game. It’s just when you get into close games against guys like this, you can take a look at any possession and say ‘we gotta do that, we gotta do that.’ They made more plays than we did down the stretch.”
Mazzulla believes in addressing the mentality behind the mistakes. It’s like a teacher trying to get a student to show their math rather than just memorizing answers. Anyone can spit out memorized facts, but the real intelligence lies within the reasoning to arrive at those facts.
The Celtics still struggle with falling for the bait laid for them in close games, either by design or by circumstance. In this game, they had Steph Curry on the ropes with five fouls.
Forget, for a moment, that they whiffed on a chance to extend their lead with Curry out of the game. The Celtics did relax a bit and the Warriors stepped up and cut a 17 point lead down to 11.
Fine. It happens. The Celtics still had an 11 point pad heading into the fourth. But they went from taking 30 shots in the first quarter and 27 in the second to 24 shots in the third and 22 in the fourth. Sure, the pace may naturally slow as the game goes on and teams milk some clock to protect leads. But the Tatum/Brown Celtics have never been good at that.
The fourth quarter was more about a bad pace and missed opportunities than anything. Early on, Tatum had a couple of possessions on Curry but never really looked to put any pressure on the officials to foul Curry out.
I fully understand that in this play, Chris Paul was distracted, Sam Hauser was wide open, and Tatum wanted to make the easy play out of a post up to get a teammate a shot he should make in his sleep.
But (a) Hauser was off Tuesday night and (b) Curry has five fouls so why not take the crack at him while he’s there? For a team that suddenly went matchup hunting down the stretch, it was weird that Tatum didn’t attack the number one matchup to be hunted in that moment. Later in the fourth, the Celtics would get back to wasting too much time looking for the advantage instead of moving the ball and creating one.
And the shots they create in those situations don’t have to be the same shots created in the first three quarters. Fourth quarters are all about making every basket you can. Throw the math out the window down the stretch. It’s all about making the highest percentage shots available. The Celtics took a lot of good shots in the fourth, but how many of them could have become great ones?
These are the challenges Boston has to figure out. As much as the Celtics have shown us over the first 25 games, they are certainly not a finished product.
This loss feels too familiar to a lot of people, but “similar” doesn’t mean “same.” The Celtics got a nice dose of reality in being torched once again by Steph Curry, and a reminder that they do have a formula to win these games. They deviated from that in this game and it cost them. They can’t do that and expect to win.
“It's the league. S--t happens,” Brown said. “You got to get ready for the next one. We got a back-to-back. We’re at a tough part of our schedule. We got to have the right mentality, come out tomorrow and find a way to get a win. Can’t drop two in a row. Regardless of what happened tonight, we got to figure out how we can come out and get a win tomorrow.”