Joe Mazzulla beat the media into the postgame press conference room. After a loss like that, there isn’t much to say to the team, or anyone else.
“They outplayed us. Every facet of the game,” he said. “Beat us on all the margins. They deserved to win.”
In the grand scheme of things, a loss to the Hawks on November 12 to drop them to 9-3 is virtually meaningless. Maybe it changes who they play in a few weeks, staying home for a couple of regular season games instead of going to Las Vegas. But other than that, it’s a loss we’ll have to look up in March to remember how it went.
But in the moment, it should get the words it deserves. The Celtics should hear and feel some of the harshness coming to them after a game like this.
“Mentally we were careless tonight. We expected to win,” Jaylen Brown said. “Too careless and it showed. I think the No. 1 category it showed in is our turnovers. Uncharacteristic of us to have 20 turnovers in any circumstance. I think that just displayed that we weren’t in sync like we normally are, so we’ve got to be better at that, and I’ve got to be better at that.”
Give Brown the credit for owning it. He was great in a lot of ways, but he was also part of the problem.
“Me and (Jayson Tatum) need to be better,” he said. “We had 20 turnovers as a team and me and him both had 11 combined. Some of them was offensive fouls and whatever. But still, just we gotta be better securing the ball and getting to our spacing. And we didn't do that tonight and it cost our team.”
But this is about more than just tonight. This loss was to the Hawks, but it’s been brewing for a few games now. For the third straight game, Mazzulla, the man known for letting his team play through bad stretches, called an early timeout to reset his team. Boston didn’t fall behind 16-2 like they did the last two games, but that was because the Hawks weren’t good enough to make it happen.
“Our starts have been pretty bad, so that's on us as a starting the starting five,” Derrick White said. “It's not really like us to come out and have to question our, like, readiness, especially like the group we have. So we have to start games better for sure.”
Maybe the Celtics are feeling that championship hangover people keep talking about. Maybe they just relaxed a bit because the Hawks were missing half their team, the Bucks are a mess, and the Nets are supposed to be tanking. Whatever it is, they need to snap out of this rut. I don’t care if they're 2-1 in these games.
Last year’s team won 64 games because they didn’t play down to the competition very often. They focused on themselves, finding ways to make plays on offense and defending well. They didn’t have many stretches like this where their focus was questioned.
Maybe it’s because they had something to prove a year ago and this season they're just trying to get by. The problem is other teams now have something to prove, and there's no better way to prove it than by beating Boston.
“We just got to up our intent level at the beginning of games and just understand that's what teams are trying to do,” White said. “You want to talk about last year all we want, but that's over with. We got to be ready to go just to start every game.”
Mazzulla tends to enjoy moments like this … that is, once he’s done seething about the loss. Early-season challenges are opportunities for his team to grow, but they can only do that if they are truly reflective. This is a chance for a bad loss to actually be a great one if they can take an honest look inward and understand why they lost.
The Hawks deserve credit for playing hard and executing, but the Celtics were on their way to putting Atlanta away. They had started hitting their shots, they’d built a 15-point lead, and the decimated Hawks' flaws were showing. But instead of seizing the opportunity to put the Hawks away, they relaxed.
“We just let go of the rope to end the third and to start the fourth and it gave them life,” Tatum said. “We didn’t play well enough to deserve the win. They did.”
The Celtics might repeat as champs playing this way, but continuing to do so certainly creates some reasonable doubt about those chances. I don’t know if this team is ready to graduate into the switch-flipping veteran squad who are just too good to care about the regular season. These guys are too young for that.
I don’t think they're going to revert back to being the team whose heads get too big, costing them too many games they should be winning. I’m not going to make that leap. For now, this is just a little blip with a nice lesson to teach.
This pattern of slow starts is starting to go from annoying to mildly concerning. They need get their heads on straight and show us they're the champions that they are, with or without Kristaps Porzingis. Losses like this are no big deal on their own, but they become one if they keep happening.
“This is a part of the journey,” Brown said. “We’ve got some stuff to clean up. We’re not a perfect team. It’s a new season, a new journey, and we’re looking forward to embracing those moments. We’re going to watch it and we’re going to address what needs to be addressed. We’ve got to be able to move forward. We can’t let it turn into a habit. We’ve got to be able to respond well. So I’m looking forward to film. We’ve got a back-to-back coming up, we’ll put it behind us. But we’re going to learn from these situations and we’ll be better.”