“I think it was healthy for us to get an ugly loss.”
Kristaps Porzings has taken to sitting down for his meetings with the media. When you get a seven-foot-four guy sprawled out in a regular person chair, he leans. And when he’s leaning and looking up at the media scrum, giving us a squinty-eyed look of contemplation, it can feel philosophical.
“It’s a little bit like a wakeup call. We’ve been kind of up and down lately and getting a loss like that I think really, really stung – the way it needs to sting,” he said. “And tonight we were a different team.”
It was, and they were. There was no sugar-coating that loss in Toronto like some kind of Tanghulu skewer in Queen West. The Celtics had to wallow in the stink of it and listen to everyone posit why things have gone sideways recently. If a loss like that didn’t sting, nothing would.
The beauty of the NBA schedule is that another game is almost always right around the corner. A bad loss is always a day or two away from fading into the background. But getting from wallowing to responding can be a tough turnaround.
“This is the fun part of why you enter the arena and why you do what you do,” Joe Mazzulla said. “This is why you play in the NBA. This is why you go after something that's extremely hard to do, is for the challenge of it. And to have an expectation of it being anything other than challenging is the wrong way to attack it. So, I tell the guys all the time, this is the most fun part. This is what we asked for.”
And so the Celtics set about trying to undo what they’d done against an Orlando Magic team that limped into Boston with half its roster missing. It was a matchup right out of the Jake Paul playbook: just dangerous enough for people to wonder, but not dangerous enough to win if their guy put in the work.
Which is what the Celtics did.
“I just liked how physical we were from the beginning,” Jayson Tatum said. “Starters haven’t necessarily started the game as well as we’d like recently. But I think tonight, we matched their intensity from the beginning, and the guys that came off the bench did an excellent job of pushing it forward.”
The Celtics got a little bit of everything they were looking for in this game. They came into this matchup having shot below 35% from 3 in five straight games, three of which were below 30%, and one below 20%. They finished this game at 45.9%, their sixth-best shooting night of the season.
They needed to play better defense. Five straight opponents put up effective field goal percentages of better than 50%. They finished this game holding Orlando to 44.5%, their fourth-best mark of the season. Their offense and defense combined to give Boston their fourth-best single-game net rating of the year.
“I think today was actually, from a rhythm perspective, a good game,” Porzingis said. “We were not shooting a crazy amount of 3s, but we were shooting the right ones. Immediately our percentages were up and we were (scoring) both in and out. And I think when we play like this, when we get downhill and create for each other and then we get the 3s, we have much more uplifting energy. When we just come down and we shoot it, if we make, OK, good. But if we miss, it can drain you a little bit. So tonight I think we had a good balanced basketball. And I think that’s when we’re the best.”
They also should be at their best when they have their normal starting group. That has not been the case lately, but they got what they needed out of that group too. They finished with a +6.6 net rating, a turnaround of about 15 points from their cumulative performance this season.
“I think that one of the good things last year was that we had that a lot,” Horford said. “I think that now, from this point forward, hopefully, we get our full group out there and we're able to build off of that and continuing to figure everything out. That's a big advantage when we're fully healthy, and we can do what we do. I feel like we're just really tough.”
It has been an up-and-down stretch for the Celtics, but they spent Friday night looking like a good team slowly draining the life out of an inferior one. They didn’t quite look like the big, bad Celtics who won the championships. They didn’t quite live up to that standard, but that's okay for now considering how they looked against the Raptors. This was was they needed.
And while it feels like a relief to see that kind of performance, we have to remember the rules of the NBA schedule apply after wins, too. The good vibes after this win mean nothing if they don't keep it rolling on Saturday night.
“Tomorrow we have another one and we have to again perform at that level,” Porzingis said. “So that’s the cool thing also when you have those batches of not playing good basketball, the next game is in two days or the next day and you have another chance to bring it back. And now it’s just for us as I said to just keep building on top of this win.”
