The Celtics really suck at sticking to narratives.
The big Marcus Smart reunion in Memphis? A dud. They played terribly and Smart didn’t play at all.
Jrue Holiday’s return to Milwaukee? [Description redacted due to graphic nature]
Ime Udoka’s return to Boston? Blah.
These guys really don’t want to make my life easy, do they? Just because you all want to take a million 3-pointers doesn’t mean I don’t want some easy layups from time to time.
“My focus today is, over the last three or four games, there’s been moments of greatness and moments of where we have to grow,” Joe Mazzulla said before the game. “We’re not really out to prove anything. Obviously the fact that Ime is back, that’s great. We worked together, and guys on the staff, but I don’t think that really has anything to do with winning or losing.”
Give Mazzulla credit. The culture he’s trying to build here is a forward-focused one where each one of these 82 regular season games has equal meaning to the one before and the one after. Who gives a damn if the old coach is in town? It has no bearing on the outcome today.
Okay fine. If Joe and the boys won’t play along, we can try Udoka. He’s always been pretty blunt and honest about things with the media. What did this game mean to you?
“It kind of doesn't matter to me at all.”
Thanks, Ime.
Let’s face it, this year is about basketball and nothing else for these Celtics. Mazzulla is challenging everyone to think differently. Players, staff, media … he isn’t playing along with any of the preconceived notions anyone is bringing to the table.
The quote I used of him before the game was an answer to a question I asked about whether he likes to let guys buy into some of these storylines and use them as motivation or if he wants to march forward like any other day. After the game, as he walked to the podium, he joked with me, asking “what did we prove tonight, Karalis?” I joked back that that was my first question, to which he said “we didn’t prove anything.”
The whole exchange was an anticipatory first shot across the bow, all in good fun but direct nonetheless. Narratives will not be accepted here.
That's not what I wanted to know. I asked a different question, one about winning the math battle that he loves by hitting a million 3-pointers but losing the margins he also loves so much. That question he liked, because it’s a basketball question.
It’s funny that coaches and the media have to work through a similar kind of chemistry that players have to, in a way, to get to the heart of what’s happening in these games. We, on the outside, only see part of the picture. The distractions I want to know about are just a small part of what an NBA coach is trying to navigate.
“I honestly don't try to get into their minds because I think they're NBA players and they have distractions every game,” He said. “They have things going on in their lives all the time. So I try not to get too into, like, ‘What are they thinking in this game?’
“Again, it's never the intentions with us. We play with the right intentions. It's the execution. And as we continue to become a better team, teams are going to continue to guard us differently, have to do different things to try and knock us off our game, and we have to be aware of what those things are, and we’ve got to be ready to execute against them.”
So if that's against Udoka on a mid-January night? So be it. What was the biggest issue coming into this game? The fact that it was Udoka patrolling the sidelines, or that it’s January 13 and these home games are basically road games without hotels because of the schedule?
“Yeah, this is just a tough part of the season,” Jaylen Brown said. “This is the part of year where mentally, you see your guys like – it starts to wane on you. Guys are checked out a little bit, focus starts to not be as much there. So making sure that our guys are ready to go regardless of all the distractions of everything that’s been going on around us.
“We’ve got to come out and put our best foot forward and it always starts on our home floor, protecting our home floor. But throughout the season, these are the moments that kind of get you mentally prepared for deep playoff runs and stuff like that. So, really want to push through this stretch, push through the end of the month before the All-Star break and keep developing our mindset and our mentality, because that will help us down the line, I think.”
Mentally, Boston came into this game against the Houston Rockets, not the Houston Udokas, and went through the process of getting a good win. They didn’t play their best at first, but they got better and fixed things as the game went along. They rode the hot shooting as far as it would take them, which happened to be all the way to a 36 point lead at one point. They did what a very good team should do to a not-so-great team.
Along the way, they had fun moments, like Brown trying to save the ball and running into a bear hug from his former coach. It was a moment that could have been a cute way to get into the “Ime returns” story.
“I was just catching him honestly more than a hug,” Udoka said. “He's a strong guy.”
Seriously, man. Can anyone give me something to work with around here?