CLEVELAND — Before the Celtics and Cavs played Game 3, I asked Joe Mazzulla about Jayson Tatum’s comments regarding fighting human nature and letting down under certain circumstances.
His response was “don’t be human. Be different.”
It’s a wonderfully Joe Mazzulla response. It’s part crazy and part inspirational. It’s part of why Mazzulla is even in this spot. He truly thinks that when life gives you something you don’t like, you don’t have to accept it. You can fight it, break through the norms, and refuse to be what everyone else is.
There's one problem though. His guys are human. This team has told us so over and over again. They’ve told us figuratively by playing down to competition and losing leads. They’ve told us literally dozens of times.
“When you have a lead like that, human nature plays a part, but we don't want things like that to haunt us coming up,” Tatum said after Game 1 of last year’s series against Atlanta. They led by 30 at halftime but won by 13.
“I think human nature plays a part, and I think basketball is just a game of runs. We came out swinging early, they responded, and we came out of halftime and they came out swinging and it took us a while, but we responded late,” he said after a Knicks game that went to overtime in January.
“Yeah, especially in the beginning of the games when we are getting good looks. It can't translate, which it shouldn't but sometimes it's human nature. We can't let it affect our defense,” he said of missing a bunch of shots in a loss to a bad Suns team in January of 2020.
The Celtics are human. And while Mazzulla’s pregame quote will look great on a T-shirt, it simply does not apply to his team. That's something he, and we, have to accept.
One of my favorite things Mazzulla has said is to not wish for things to be anything other than what they are. There's a lot of brilliance in that thought because it requires us to see things for what they are and to deal with that reality, not what we want that reality to be.
These Celtics are elite athletes, tremendous basketball players, and the best team in the NBA this season. They are the heavy favorites to win the championship, and for good reason.
They are also humans who are susceptible to the emotional swings of human nature. They are not rising above them. They are not blocking them out. They are feeling all of those feelings and there's no way around that.
I’ve been standing on my soapbox screaming about how this team is different than they’ve been in the past. And they are. This win over the Cavs is proof that they are capable of recovering when they stumble. They are Willy Wonka when he first walks out of the chocolate factory, limping and struggling, ready to fall on their faces when suddenly they tuck, roll, and pop up on their feet.
And that's better than last season when there was no tuck or roll.
But they're not writing new scripts. They’ve simply changed the ending. They still came out sluggish against a struggling team missing its superstar Donovan Mitchell. They turned the ball over six times, handing the Cavs 10 points in a first quarter won by seven, not 17.
When asked about how the Celtics could have been more poised early on, he said “just passing to the guys with the green jerseys. That's poise. That’s the most poise you can have. … Balls are getting deflected and thrown out of bounds. Just pass. I am being dead serious. Stay spaced, make the right pass.”
It’s not a hard concept, but when your head is in the clouds because human nature has sapped your focus, colors don’t mean anything anymore. The whole world is a blur.
“They have to play a little bit differently when he's not out there. It may take a quarter or two to figure out what you need to do to win the ballgame,” Tatum said, which is understandable from a human point of view, but frustrating from a basketball one.
They're not going to change who they are. They won’t miss many chances to let up a little when the opportunity presents itself. They have been better about playing down to competition this season, and there are a lot of instances of them coming out and curb-stomping bad teams into submission in a hurry. But just like cheating on a diet, they will still fall back into bad habits from time to time.
What they're not doing much of anymore is eating a whole sleeve of cookies and washing it down with a quart of whole milk, and that's going to have to be enough.
Maybe they can give Dean Pelton a call about borrowing Greendale’s Human Being mascot. They can play Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature” for the introductions. At least then everyone will understand how this team will play, struggle, and break through for wins.
Would it be nice for them to be cold-blooded assassins, winning all of these games by 40? Sure. But look around. No one is doing that. Everyone is in a fight, and Boston is the only team up 3-1 right now. They have a chance to close things out and go 8-2 to start the playoffs, a better winning percentage than they put up to start the season. They're winning. They're just doing it their way. The human way.
It’s not the best script in the world, but the ending is great.