I love perspective.
You can put two bottles on a table, one behind the other, and if someone looked at it from a certain perspective, they’d swear there was only one. You don’t know there's more to it until you shift your perspective.
That works with this road trip as well.
People were out for blood after the two losses in Atlanta. Honestly, I’ve never seen people as angry around here as they were after that second loss. The players were frauds. Joe Mazzulla was a moron. And I was a schill and a “green teamer” for suggesting anything different.
Okay, fine. Those were frustrating games. I get it. But let’s look at the bigger picture.
The Celtics started the trip 11 games ahead of Milwaukee in the loss column. They finished it 11 games ahead of Milwaukee in the loss column. They started it six games ahead of OKC in the loss column … and finished six games ahead.
They lost no ground against any of their competition because their competition also lost games. One of the criticisms of this team is their inability to hold late leads. Well, I think this is the most important late lead they’ve had this season, and they didn’t give up any of it.
Over the course of this road trip, Boston had the league’s best offense and fourth-best net rating. In terms of net rating (the difference between how many points they score per 100 possessions versus how many they allow), Only Dallas, New York, and Miami were better. Boston was better than Minnesota (6), Denver (7), Milwaukee (8), OKC (15), and the Clippers (18).
On the flip side, their defense over that at stretch was 18th overall, which is not up to Boston’s standards. Opponents shot 49% against the Celtics during this trip, nearly four full percentage points better than usual. They are second in the league in overall opponent field goal percentage this season, but they were 23rd over these six games.
The losses against the Hawks, a potential first-round opponent, were not great. But to their credit, the Hawks caught fire in this stretch. Boston poured some gasoline on that fire by relaxing too much in the first game and letting the Hawks have some life, but the Hawks also have the NBA’s third-best offensive rating over the past six games. Dejounte Murray was named Eastern Conference Player of the Week, which means he’s been on a heater outside the games against the Celtis.
Boston paid dearly for their mistakes against a team that can fill it up and a player who got super-hot.
“(It’s about) just understanding that it's not always going to go the way we expect it to,” Jayson Tatum said. “How are we going to respond? If we lose the first game in round one, how are we going to respond? So just going through each game just brought some different out of us and it was good. It's good for us to go through that.”
Was it their best road trip? No, of course not. But I don’t want to let those two losses in Atlanta hold too much weight. As I wrote after the win over Chicago, the Celtics were like the dogs in those viral videos of their owners pretending to sleep with the treat in their hands. They were bound to give in to the temptation of snatching that at some point, despite having been good for a very long time.
“I'd like to think that we come away from (this trip) a better team,” Mazzulla said. “Regardless of the result, it's just finding ways to win and it's understanding the things that we need to get better at. I think our defense has been consistent, our rebounding was a little inconsistent, but our offensive execution, I thought, was really consistent. So if you could just stay consistent in the things that you're working towards every day, that's all you can ask for.”
So here we are. The Celtics went 4-2 on the trip, which is good. They're 8-2 in their last 10, which is second only to Houston and Dallas going 9-1. They were better than Denver, OKC, Minnesota, and Milwaukee. The Bucks lost to the Lakers (without LeBron James). OKC lost to the Rockets. Minnesota lost to Chicago.
Meanwhile, Boston made some mistakes and then corrected them later in the trip. You can argue they played down to bad competition in Atlanta, but they didn't do that in Charlotte. They went to slow, Tatum-centric offense late in the first Atlanta game but went to a Kristaps Porzingis post-up in overtime of the second game. They went to Porzingis/Derrick White actions late against New Orleans to avoid repeating the mistake of blowing a late lead. And in Charlotte, they capped the night with a barrage of 3-pointers from Sam Hauser to run away with a business-like win.
Was the trip perfect? No. I won’t even say it was great. But it was good. It was successful. And when you look at what the rest of the league was doing at the same time, it was better you probably thought.
Perspective matters.
