BSJ Game Report: Lakers 114, Celtics 105 - Poor effort, worse execution, lead to terrible home loss

Everything you need to know about the Celtics loss to the Lakers, with BSJ insight and analysis

IN A NUTSHELL

The Celtics played perhaps their sloppiest quarter of the season, turning it over nine times. But a late run cut an 11-point deficit to three heading into the second. They took a brief lead but then the turnovers and misses started flowing while the Lakers stayed hot. A 16-point halftime lead was cut to six, but it quickly got back up to double digits, where it stayed for the whole fourth quarter thanks to incredibly hot shooting by the Lakers. 

Box Scored

HEADLINES

- Complete letdown: Before the game, I wrote that “the key for Boston in this game is not to let that disappointment or the thought that this will now be an easy game lead to a letdown. The Lakers have NBA players on their team as well, and this is a chance for these guys to shine on national television.” 

Well, they let down and the remaining Lakers took advantage of their time to shine. Boston turned it over nine times in the first quarter and they looked out of sorts all game. The Lakers got hot and never stopped hitting big shots.

- Austin Reaves: An electric performance from a guy who has struggled a bit this season. He’s a bit of a sensation in Los Angeles, and the Lakers have been reluctant to include him in potential deals, and this is why. When he gets going, he can get hot and carry an offense. The Celtics did a terrible job of attacking him and making him work defensively. 

- Hot shooting: To make matters worse, the Lakers, a bad 3-point shooting team, went 19-36 from deep … a blistering 52.8%. This felt like a classic case of letting guys get confident and that confidence carrying the Lakers to wild outlier shooting game. If the Celtics had played any real defense, they could have avoided a night like this.

TURNING POINT

I’m tempted to say the nine first-quarter turnovers because that set the tone for the whole game, but in reality it was the third-quarter stretch where Boston cut the lead down to six and then were outscored 11-7 over the final four minutes. Instead of walking the lead all the way down, they let up again and it hung around double digits the rest of the way.

THINGS I LIKED

- Sam Hauser: Probably their best player in this game. I would have gone with more of him and less Jaylen Brown in this game. 

- Payton Pritchard: Part of the bench unit that helped keep this game close. 

- Neemias Queta: They needed something from a big in this game and he at least brought some energy. Everyone on the bench was a positive +/-. All the starters were negatives.

THINGS I DIDN’T LIKE

- The mentality: I’m going to say a lot about this tonight, so I won’t waste it here. Just know that this is reasons one-through-100 why they lost this game. 

- The early turnovers: They only had three in the second half, so they figured it out, but the nine in the first quarter were horrible. It was comical how bad those were. 

- Offensive rebounds: The Celtics allowed 10 in the first quarter, which is ugly, and just five the rest of the game. But one of those five was a gross one where one Laker was surrounded by four Celtics and he still got the board. Joe Mazzulla pulled Jaylen Brown, Kristaps Porzingis, and Jrue Holiday after that. 

Jaylen Brown: "I wasn’t playing my best," he said after the game. "Every time I step on the court, I try to add to winning. Tonight, I tried to make sure I was being unselfish, hitting the guys in stride, sharing the ball. But I was a little lackadaisical, it wasn’t my best game." He had three turnovers in the first quarter and he couldn't hit a thing. He finished with eight points, which is his second eight-point game in a week. Brown has been talking about fighting through a tough stretch of the season and has dropped hints that it's also tough on him. He has to find a way to get through this and back to the guy who just earned a trip to the All-Star game.

Kristaps Porzingis: He also had three first-quarter turnovers. He couldn't find his range from 3 and he struggled defensively. 

Derrick White: He's having a very all-or-nothing kind of stretch right now. This was a nothing game where he just 4-11 and 1-5 from 3. 

HIGHLIGHTS

ONE KARALIS WILL PROBABLY REGRET LATER

- This was bad, let’s not overreact

Porzingis summed it up nicely when he said “you’re going to lose this type of game and fans are going to think it’s the end of the world. We lost to the Lakers without AD and LeBron, like, end of the season. Boom. Done. But it’s just a loss. It’s just a loss which we have to learn from.”

Don’t worry, I’ll give them the appropriate post-mortem in my column in a bit. At the same time, a horrible, unacceptable, played like dog poop and deservedly got booed at home kind of loss doesn’t have to be the end of the world. 

“Stretches of bad basketball happen. You work your butt off every day to minimize those, but stretches of bad basketball happen,” Mazzulla said. “We can’t sit here and act like we’re too entitled for it to happen to us. It happens. It’s a matter of how we respond to it, and can we work through it. It’s constant daily choices, daily habits that you have to commit to every single day. To think we’re not going to go through difficult times during an 82 game NBA season is not the right way to look at it. So am I pissed about losing? Yes. But am I ecstatic about the opportunity for us to grow as a team? I’m even happier about that.”

I know it sucks to hear “these things happen,” but that's the case. I know fans live and die with these wins and losses, and that's the beauty of what fans get to do. The team can’t do that, and they shouldn’t. 

Mazzulla and I disagreed about using the term “embarrassing” to apply to this loss. I think it is embarrassing, at least in a basketball sense. They should feel that and take it out on Memphis. They owe the Grizzlies a whoopin’ after a stinker there earlier this season. Bouncing back and erasing bad memories in the league is pretty easy. 

And if you want to say “great teams don’t lose these games,” go check out how Denver finished March and April last season. It happens. 

Next up: The Celtics continue the homestand Sunday at 6:00 p.m. against the Grizzlies