Karalis: Celtics get humbled at home under a pile of missed shots

I tried finding the perfect highlight to fully encompass what we witnessed Saturday night at TD Garden. 

This is what I came up with: 

Let’s break it down. 

In the first photo, Ben Affleck was struggling but still keeping it somewhat together. There was a chance, if he was careful, to regain his composure, keep it all together, and escape with all his Dunkin. 

The second photo shows there's clearly going to be some kind of loss. He was just going to have to minimize the damage and maybe … possibly … still escape this scene as the hero with crullers and Boston Kremes. 

By the third, it was obvious this was going to be a total loss. This went from salvageable to comical in a hurry. The fourth photo is full of garbage. 

This was how the game went against the Clippers. The only difference, other than one was a basketball game and the other was six boxes of A1C bombs, is that Affleck’s photos were staged, and Boston’s loss was very real. 

“A good ol’ fashioned ass-whoopin’,” is how Jrue Holiday characterized it. “They did everything better: Rebounding, transition, 50/50 balls, it seemed like they were a step ahead.” 

The Clippers outplayed the Celtics in every way on Saturday night. The only solace for the Garden crowd is that it was a Saturday, so they were either a few drinks in when they got to the arena, or they had time afterward to head out and drown their sorrows and launch into odes to Bill Brasky. 

The Celtics were without Kristaps Porzingis, who is nursing a sprained ankle. If there is any silver lining, it’s that Porzingis was walking around the arena without any limp and no added apparatus. Joe Mazzulla said before the game that there was no long-term concern for Porzingis, and if I didn’t know any better, I wouldn’t have pegged him for a guy who missed this game with an injury as he walked down the hallway to his car. 

Not having their unicorn shouldn’t have led to this kind of drubbing. This wasn’t a case of a shorthanded team struggling against a motivated Clippers squad looking for some redemption for a blowout on their own floor. Yes, the Clippers looked like a team with some fire in their eyes, but Boston was right there with them to start the game. They were only down five after one despite missing 19 of 26 shots. 

But the pressure of those losses piled up. 

“It’s tough. We feel like we were getting good looks and we just didn’t really shoot the ball well,” Jayson Tatum said., “Some of our possessions could have been better but it was just a tough night for us. And then unfortunately we kind of let our offense affect our defense and they got a lot of leak-outs and easy ones in transition.”

It’s been a while since we’ve seen this kind of night from Boston. This wasn’t the same kind of blowout they suffered in Milwaukee. That team was a step slow all night. This was a team that seemed ready to play just having a rough shooting night, and then that rough shooting led to defensive mistakes, and ultimately a complete defensive breakdown. 

“Our inefficient offense put pressure on our defense,” Mazzulla said. “Then our defense kind of cracked, and I thought that's kind of how the game went …  Missed shots. Missed layups. I thought they did a good job of messing up the timing of every one of our passes with their active hands, and so what looked like a guy open, we missed it a half a second because of their activity and their active hands, and it kind of messed up the timing and rhythm of our offense.”

If there's a silver lining here, it’s that the Clippers showed a bit of a blueprint for how to disrupt the Celtics. They gave Mazzulla and his staff some quality game tape to bring into the next team meeting. If a team tries to copy what the Clippers did, the Celtics can now come up with answers. 

You can’t make an antidote without the venom. 

But even with that, hitting shots and getting back to set their defense could have fixed a lot of issues. Yes, the Clippers played fantastic defense, which they are known to do, but the Celtics missed even the wide-open looks they generated. 

At one point, Jrue Holiday watched a shot go halfway down and pop out. He turned to run back, looked towards the rafters, and let out an “OH MY GOD!” Holiday is this team’s emotional rudder, always keeping an even keel even during some of the Celtics most emotional stretches. When HE is getting visibly frustrated, then you know it’s a bad night.

“Definitely humbling, I think, to be able to kind of come home and get your butt kicked,” Holiday said. “But we know it’s a long season. We know we can learn from this and just kind of hold it in our back pocket. It’ll always be in the back of our head when we have a good game the game before.”

Things have a way of evening out. And as usual, this league is about the response to the bad game as much as it’s about the game itself. 

“You’re never as good as you think you are, you're never as bad as you think you are,” Mazzulla said. “And I think it's important. We always talk about adversity, and adversity is always looked at as something negative happens to you. But to me, one of the hardest things to do is win consistently, all the time, and handle success. And that's just as hard as handling losing, is being able to handle success. So I think regardless, you just focus on the character of your team, and our guys will bounce back.”