For a brief period on Thursday afternoon, a bright yellow ball of fire lit up the sky. It brought a touch of heat to melt the grey, allowing for unzipped jackets, hatless heads, and, for a little while, an easing of our collective seasonal affective disorder.
Then Austin Reaves caught that ball of fire and used it to torch the nets at the TD Garden, causing people to put on their coats, pull their hoods over their faces, and make a depressed march out into the cold.
For the first time this season, the Celtics put forth the worst possible combination of poor effort and poor execution. Yes, they were waxed in Milwaukee, but that was a complete lack of energy. And yes, they were destroyed by the Clippers a week ago, but they actually started that game out well and it fell apart as the shots continued to miss.
This game was worse than those.
The Celtics heard that LeBron James and Anthony Davis were sitting out and they chose to respond with a half-assed effort. They gave up 10 offensive rebounds in the first quarter … TEN! … to the worst offensive rebounding team in the league (they average 8.4 per game). They allowed nearly 53% 3-point shooting from a middle-of-the-pack shooting team (they’re 15th in the NBA). They turned it over nine times in the first quarter against a team that normally forces 13.9 in a game.
And those turnovers were an adventure. All of them were preventable. All of them were ugly. If the Lakers weren’t a terrible team, they would have put this game away by halftime.
After running off 20 straight home wins to start the season, the Celtics are 2-2 at home on this homestand with a blowout loss to the Clippers, two close wins against the Pelicans and Pacers, and then this debacle against, of all teams, the Lakers.
“We’re playing poor stretches of basketball and we’re not playing well, and we sucked tonight,” Joe Mazzulla said. “We’re not playing well. To me, you can’t run from that. That’s just the way that it is. It’s going to happen. There’s five teams in the NBA that went, what, 72-10? That doesn’t happen very often, so you’re going to have tough stretches. You can’t run from that. We’re not playing good basketball right now … That’s a fact.”
They are not. They played a nearly perfect game in Miami and left their good habits there. Maybe we got spoiled by that amazing run to start the season at TD Garden, or maybe they bought into themselves a little too much. Either way, the magic of playing on the parquet has faded.
It was a bit embarrassing for them. Regardless of who is on the floor, Celtics-Lakers is a big deal. The arena was buzzing before the game. The floor was crowded with media. The building was full much earlier than usual.
“Of course it sucks,” Kristaps Porzingis said. “I know, especially for fans and for us, like it’s always a rivalry between us and the Lakers. We don’t want to lose to them ever again. But this is the NBA. This is the NBA. This is almost like a script. You’re going to lose this type of game and fans are going to think it’s the end of the world, and 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.”
It’s nights like this where NBA players and NBA fans diverge. For a player, there isn’t much time to wallow in the muck of getting smoked by D’Angelo Russell and Jaxson Hayes. The Celtics, in fact, have already mostly moved on. By the time you read this, most of the guys will either be asleep or have gotten a great night’s rest. The sting of regular season losses is as painful as a flu shot to them.
This was a cardinal sin to everyone in the stands or watching at home. The rage of hearing “Let’s Go Lakers” chants from the emboldened few Los Angeles fans in the building burns so hot that if this were feudal Japan, there would be demands for harakiri.
To say the players are taking the loss better than some fans is an understatement.
“In reality, we just can’t change what just happened,” Jayson Tatum said. “I’m certain everybody in this room wishes they could go back and change some shit they did when they was younger. But we didn’t play well enough to win and they did, so we have to give them credit. But we got a couple of practices and look forward to bouncing back on Sunday.”
There is no choice for them but to move on quickly. They can’t compound this mistake by making more against the Grizzlies. At the same time, a good wallow might not be a bad thing. Sitting and stewing in the juices of failure is a hell of a way to prevent that failure from happening again.
“I think this saying, this quote, always works for me: You win or you learn,” Porzingis said. “You learn more from your losses, 100 percent. If you win a lot of times it covers some of the stuff, but a loss like tonight and even a tough game like Indiana, and of course we try to always look at each other, look at ourselves in the mirror like, ‘OK, even if we won, what are the things we need to clean up? What do we need to do better?’ But it still doesn’t hit the same as when you actually get a loss.… We definitely learn more from the losses and I think this is healthy for us.”
As Mazzulla put it, “I don’t mind getting booed. It’s good for ya.” Fans should hold the team accountable for a poor effort. Players need to soak that in, because getting booed actually sucks.
This was the worst loss of the season, and people have a right to be angry about it. It’s also one of few losses of the season, so players have the right to move on from it pretty quickly.
“I think it’s unacceptable. Doesn’t mean I’m concerned,” Mazzulla said. “We’ll work through it. I think part of a bad stretch of basketball is physical just as much as mental, and I think those two things go hand in hand. So I think it’s unacceptable for those things to happen, but if you take a look at the whole scope of our season, they happen very little. So to look at everything with just this lens of two games or a stretch or a week or whatever the case may be doesn’t do justice to the process of what we do over a long period of time. So it’s unacceptable, make sure you know that, but at the same time, it’s going to happen, and it’s a matter of holding guys accountable and working through it.”