There are lines everywhere around us. We cross some, we avoid getting close to others. And even when we make everyone aware that there might be some interaction with the line, it might be too much for some people to take.
Even if your wife is cool with you going to the gentleman’s club, coming home broke, drunk, and covered in glitter might not be greeted with smiles and hugs.
And so even though the Celtics have made it quite clear that it’s tough to find the motivation to close out this regular season schedule, the magnitude of just how little they seem to care is too jarring for some people to handle.
“I did not like the effort level in the first half, but I think it’s just a tough spot to be in,” Joe Mazzulla said after their loss to the Knicks. “They’ve done the best they could over the course of this stretch, whatever it’s been, a week and a half, but no, I didn’t like it in the first half.”
Not many people did. There were even boos in the third quarter when the Celtics finally pulled their regulars when down 30. The Celtics have looked awful against Milwaukee and New York, two potential playoff opponents. While it might be easily explained away by saying this is what happens when teams desperate for playoff seeding face an unmotivated team that's had their seed locked up for a while, there are still people who think this team is suddenly Liz Lemon stepping in front of an HD camera.
“It's just one game. We lost two in a row. Doesn't define who we are,” Jayson Tatum said. “We had a great season thus far and a great job of managing the season. You play 82 games, we've had a bad three days. But overall, best record in the league, 15 games ahead of second place. We not perfect, but, you know, we can learn from these and it is a tough position to be in. But, we asked for it, so, you know, we do got to be better.”
The concern is that bad habits are creeping in. The negativity comes from losing looking familiar, like this is more relapsing than it is relaxing. We can say this is just a regular season thing, like the Denver Nuggets going 9-10 to close last regular season and then flipping a switch and winning it all, but the fear is that it will seep past April 14.
“Maybe we’ll get our ass kicked again one more time to start the series, who knows? And then it’s a wake-up call for us,” Kristaps Porzingis said. “I don’t think it’s a habit for us.”
It’s hard to say how things will go for the Celtics. I’d like to think that 80 games have shown us that they’ve built a lot of good habits. I think each season is its own entity, and I think this season has shown almost none of the issues that have bothered Boston in the past.
The problem is that those things look like they've shown up now, the closest point to the playoffs. And no amount of context or history will quell the concerns of the fearful. It doesn’t matter that the Nuggets looked much worse than Boston for much longer a year ago. All that matters is that they won, which retrospectively changed the perception. It doesn’t matter that until then the Nuggets were the chokers.
It doesn’t matter that the 2008 Celtics finished on a monster run, winning 11 of 12 but then struggled through the first two rounds, or that the 2010 Celtics lost seven of 10 to end the regular season but then didn’t see a Game 7 until the Finals. Context isn’t the antidote for fear. Results are.
The Celtics will have to prove that these are just a couple of bad days and not the return of bad habits. They’ll do it by winning in the playoffs. Just like old adage goes, you can’t win until you win.
But wherever you stand at a time like this, the most important thing to understand is that every run is different. And no matter what we think, nothing that's happening right now is related to much in the past. This team is doing this their own way. And they feel good about how things are going, despite how things might look recently.
“I have to bet, we will show up at the level we need to show up. But it’s on us,” Porzingis said. “I would say no chance we don’t turn up as the team that the fans love on the first playoff game.”