Before the season started, Joe Mazzulla said that he hoped the Celtics would see the red dot on their forehead as teams target them.
Well, it’s there.
Maybe the C’s aren’t looking in the mirror long enough to notice. Maybe they just think it’s a weird pimple. Whatever it is, two things are abundantly clear at the moment: Teams are getting up to play Boston just about every night, and the Celtics aren’t always ready for that challenge.
“We should be used to that,” Jayson Tatum said after losing to the Pacers. “It’s been like that for the last few years. We’ve got to start swinging first. We’ve got to get back to that.”
As usual, the Celtics can show bits and pieces of what they are capable of when they want to be themselves. None of this ever has to do with an inability to do something. At the same time, this caveat is tiring.
If you’re capable of doing something, then do it.
“We’ve had some great moments this season and maybe some comfort has slipped in,” Jaylen Brown said. “Offensively, we’re fine. I just think defensively we’ve got to find ways to get more stops and be more consistent protecting the basket, helping each other, communicating. We just didn’t emphasize that enough.”
Being fine offensively is the issue for Boston right now. They are, generally speaking, fine on the offensive end. Their offensive rating is still at 119.5, a monster number. Their rating in this game was 116.3, which is more than enough to win a vast majority of their games.
But their defensive rating was 124.2, a disgusting number that's almost five full points worse than the worst defense in the NBA this season.
“It’s kind of slipped over the last few games, our intensity,” Brown said. “Teams are pressuring us and being physical with us. We’ve got to do the same stuff back to them. We did some good stuff in spots, but just not enough.”
The Celtics can dispute this all they want, but their actions this season have been telling. Their attitude towards defense has been to play just enough to get by. On some nights, when the offense was humming, they could get away with none. On others, when the offense wasn’t quite there, they turned it up only as much as they had to. Sometimes Payton Pritchard had to rescue the offense. Other times Derrick White or Jrue Holiday had to go on hot streaks. But no matter who has had the hot hand, the defense has mostly been an afterthought.
And yeah, maybe they’ll figure it out somewhere down the road, that doesn’t make this part of the process any more fun.
“We’ve got a lot of basketball left. We’re so far from our ultimate goal, right? It’s so far down the road,” Tatum said. “This is my eighth year, and every year there’s some good moments and some not-so-good moments. It’s how you navigate the growth over a season. Some stretches are better than others. You feel better during certain stretches than you do others. That’s just part of being in the NBA.”
This is true, and maybe they spoiled us last year with 82 games of motivated basketball. They're too young to be a copy of the 2010 Celtics, but that team certainly picked its spots. They had a 4-8 stretch from late December to mid-January that drove people crazy. Age aside, an internal knowledge that a switch can be flipped can look like that sometimes.
And there is no doubt that this team can do that.
The reason why Mazzulla wanted these guys to see the red dot is because not feeling the threat put them at risk for games like this. Not feeling like the ultimate goal is at risk opens them up to bad games in areas where the most effort is involved.
It's like I said the other day. A starving man will fight you for a scrap of food. Someone who eats well won’t put in that kind of effort.
The Celtics are fat and happy right now, which is a bad place to be as we head into the sleepy part of the schedule. As Brown said, some comfort has slipped in, and when it comes to basketball, that's like having a water leak that you don't address. This is historically when the ball stops moving and the spacing is thrown off. Human nature, something these guys love to talk about, will kick in. If they don't stop the leak, things might get worse before they get better.
Of course, that is unless they do something different, which is completely up to them.
“I think we just got to get back to the basics,” Tatum said. “There’s times where things can get off track and as professionals, we gotta lock back in and get back to our identity, which I’m very confident that we can. It’s just a matter about doing it.”
Tatum has never had a more accurate statement in his life, even if he missed a chance to drop his sneaker company’s classic motto in the process. The Celtics have to just do it, and that's simply a matter of wanting to.
Any day now will do.