BSJ Game Report: Thunder 105, Celtics 92 - C's offense disappears as OKC pulls away late

Everything you need to know about the Celtics loss to the Thunder, with BSJ insight and analysis.

IN A NUTSHELL

Jaylen Brown returned and attacked early, but Shai Gilgeous-Alexander was doing his thing to carry OKC to a lead. But Jayson Tatum’s aggressiveness got him to the line, giving Boston a three-point lead after one. They pushed it to 10 with both Tatum and SGA off the floor and used incredible execution on both ends to keep it there at the half. OKC ratcheted up the defense in the second half and Boston's offense disappeared. Boston scored 15 points in the third and just 12 in the fourth while Gilgeous-Alexander did his thing to help the Thunder pull away late. The Celtics suffered their first double-digit loss of the season. 

Box Score

HEADLINES

- Physical Thunder defense: The Thunder foul a lot but it’s because they play a very physical brand of basketball that challenges the refs to blow the whistle. They took their game up a couple of notches in the second half, and it felt like the Celtics slowly wilted. They sped up a little and it threw their offense off.

- Second-half swoon: The numbers after halftime are just gross. They shot 8-40 overall, 3-24 from 3, 2-11 in the paint, and they turned it over 10 times leading to 17 Thunder points. The Celtics scored 35 and 30 points in the first and second quarters but just 27 in the entire second half. Brown, Jrue Holiday, Derrick White, Sam Hauser, and Payton Pritchard all went scoreless 

- Cold as ice: Boston shot 9-46 from 3, just 19.6%. That's just a brutally bad shooting night. The Thunder are not a great shooting team in general, and they shot 16-38 (42%). This is shooting variance to the extreme. 

TURNING POINT

The Thunder closed the fourth quarter on a 20-7 run after it was tied at 85. 

THINGS I LIKED

- The first half: This was a beautiful half of basketball. I loved everything about it from both teams. It was physical, both teams did what they do well, and the Celtics were executing at a high level on both ends. Jaylen Brown scored 21 in the first half with three assists, a steal, and a block. Kristaps Porzingis was huge in the second quarter to help open up the 10-point lead. Derrick White was doing Derrick White things. 

The defense in the first half was top-notch. Gilgeous-Alexander started strong but they cut his water off pretty nicely after that. The Celtics looked like the champs and were playing at a different level.

THINGS I DIDN’T LIKE

- The second-half offense: The defense was actually pretty good throughout the game except for early in the first and the last couple minutes of the fourth. They held OKC to 23 in the second, 21 in the third, and it was 18 at the 2:23 mark of the fourth. OKC exploded for 11 over the final 2:22. 

But the offense in the second wasn’t what it needed to be. Some of these shots were just flat-out misses. After the game, the buzz word was “spacing” which we’ll look at separately. It wasn’t that the Celtics weren’t getting good shots when they got them, it’s that they had too many turnovers because of poor spacing, which gave them no outlets. 

- Late turnovers: I felt like I was watching a 2022-23 Celtics finish. Brown got caught twice in the fourth quarter with the kinds of turnovers that used to drive me nuts where he’d get too deep, they’d send late help, and he coughed it up. 

- Payton Pritchard: He’s probably the front-runner for Sixth Man of the Year, but he is still susceptible to bad matchups. This was a bad one for him. 

HIGHLIGHTS

TWO TAKES KARALIS WILL PROBABLY REGRET LATER

- Boston did enough defensively in the fourth quarter

The game was tied at 85 with 7:14 to go in the game. Boston was out-scored by 13 the rest of the way, but the Celtics actually did everything they needed to do defensively to win this game. Between the 7:14 mark and 2:23, nearly five full minutes, Boston held the Thunder to 3-7 shooting and three turnovers. Boston lost that stretch by six, but they shot 1-8 from the field with three turnovers of their own. 

At 2:22 Lu Dort hit the first of two 3-pointers that put the game away. Once those fell, the Celtics lost their composure. 

Boston’s offense did not run well, which led to missed shots and turnovers. Some of those misses were also, simply, just misses, which happens. But the Celtics offense was clearly lacking in the second half, which too bad because they had plenty of opportunities to win. 

- The complaining about 3-pointers has gone overboard

I’ve already heard a lot of screaming about this because teams can’t have bad shooting nights in 2025 without it being a referendum on the game or a coach, but I didn’t see many bad shots. At first glance, I didn’t have a problem with the shots they got. 

They probably had more ill-advised drives than they did bad 3-pointers. As I noted before, Boston got zero points from Brown, White, Holiday, Hauser, and Pritchard. They combined to go 0-13 from 3, which is one of those stats people latch onto. But do we really have a problem with Hauser, Pritchard, and Holiday taking two each, Brown taking three, or White taking four? 

Those are all shots they generally make, and shots they made in Houston. Aside from a few shots towards the end when things got frantic under the weight of a growing Thunder lead, I’d let all these guys take those exact same shots every game. There's a good chance they make four, five, or six of those much more often than they make zero. 

Of course, it’s incredibly frustrating when those shots don’t fall, but there's so much more to it. 

Next up: The Celtics end their road trip in Denver on Tuesday night.