In the middle of a postgame exchange with a reporter, Joe Mazzulla let out his most honest assessment of a Celtics performance we’ve ever heard.
“Yeah we blew that one,” he said. “That was bad.”
There is no other way to put it. While the Celtics had other chances to create some separation against the Hawks on Saturday night, they had the game won. They were up three with 20 seconds on the clock and the ball in their hands.
But, just like they have all too often over this month-long mess, the Celtics did uncharacteristically unthinkable things that led to a loss: A turnover instead of scoring or holding the ball for free throws, and a seemingly intentional foul only up two to allow Atlanta to tie the game.
“Those are decisions that we've made well at times this season and today — the last couple games, we just haven't,” Mazzulla said. “I think that's part of the journey of another season is continuing to hammer those details home, re-learn those processes, execute those. … We know exactly why we lost the game, and we’ve got to learn from it.”
The Celtics have had a few losses that carry some important lessons, and after each of them the team talks about needing to learn. And then they fire off a win with some impressive elements to it and we think, maybe, they are starting to figure those things out.
But then they find a way to fall backward.
“Today it was just execution,” Jrue Holiday said. “I think we had the game won. I’ve got to make some better plays. Make a better pass to JB, or maybe if I hold onto the ball, get free throws, it’s a different situation. I don’t foul Trae, we’re still up 2. So this game is on me, and execution on my part has to be better.”
We might all be learning together how difficult it is to replicate a championship season. The Celtics might think they can pull off the NBA equivalent of getting by on their looks during the traditional doldrums of the NBA season, but it takes a lot more than that.
Mazzulla’s number one focus is getting his team to execute the details, but that's the one thing that has been missing the most during this run. The Celtics haven't been able to focus on the little things necessary to get the big things right. That's why a normally reliable veteran like Holiday completely botched the end of the fourth quarter.
And it’s also why the Celtics soiled themselves in the second quarter. They had a three-on-one break against Trae Young and turned the ball over on a wild alley-oop attempt. And then Tatum missed a layup on three-on-two the next possession.
In the past, they probably would have pulled out of this tailspin fairly quickly. This season, it feels like they last a lot longer.
It’s like the Austin Powers steamroller scene. There is generally plenty of opportunity to get out of trouble, but the Celtics just … don’t.
"There might be some truth to that,” Tatum said. “I think part of it is you're not shooting the ball or converting or missing layups and threes and shots that we normally shoot at a high rate that would stop the bleeding, I guess, per se. So I think in this stretch, still trying to generate great shots and get guys in the right spots. We're just not shooting the ball as well as we normally do."
That's fair. Sam Hauser got a wide open 3-pointer in the corner that could have made it an 11-point game after that and he missed. Derrick White stepped into a clean 3 with the spread at five but missed. He missed another good look when it was a two-point game. The Celtics had plenty of chances to hold the Hawks off by making shots they usually hit, but they didn’t fall.
“We missed shots. And so the low-hanging fruit is to focus on those last few plays, which, yeah, are important. You have to execute those and we didn't,” Mazzulla said. “But there are still plenty of plays throughout that we could get better at in a close game like that, that we have to learn from, and the second quarter is another one of those things.”
I wish I could tell you there was an easy way out of all this for the Celtics. It would be so much better if just one thing was going wrong. Then a Dutch boy could put his finger in the dike, stop the leak, and save the town. But this loss was something completely different than the Toronto loss, which was very different than the OKC loss, and so on.
"I think tonight might have been different than other nights,” Tatum said. “I think the way we competed, how hard we played, how physical we were tonight compared to maybe Toronto was night and day. Some live-ball turnovers, some missed opportunities, some fast breaks. But we were playing with pace. We had the right intentions. We had the right mindset tonight. We just -- we shot 38% from the field. That's the tough part: When you're doing things a certain way and the results aren't matching, how do you continue to stay positive and keep fighting and keep going forward?"
This is what’s at the heart of it all for the Celtics.
If they truly are doing things the way they should and the results just aren’t matching, then you change nothing because the results will eventually come around.
But if the team thinks they're doing things right when they're not, then the Celtics have a problem. And this is where the debate truly starts. Figuring out which of these is at the heart of this stretch is the first step of fixing it.
“We need to fix it. We have to fix the details. And we will, and we'll do that,” Mazzulla said. “I trust the character and the mindset and the preparation of our team, and over the course of a long stretch, whether that's till All-Star break, till season, till playoffs, till next year, I don't know, but there's just the utmost trust in how they carry themselves. There's not a group of people that I wouldn't rather go through something difficult together with. So again, sign me up. Doesn't mean I'm happy, but this is the thought process about how we're going to go about it.”