The media had gathered inside the Celtics locker room about half an hour after the loss to the Dallas Mavericks. As everyone waited for the first player up to speak, the arena’s fire alarm system went off. While everyone was looking around to see if this was something real or a false alarm, Derrick White, seated at his locker, said “it’s that kind of night.”
That might have been the only thing anyone needed to say after this game. Payton Pritchard added to it, though.
“We’ve been struggling this year coming off long road trips, coming back home. The first game at home,” Payton Pritchard said. “That’s something we’ve gotta fix.”
That would be nice, yes.
It wasn’t hard to tell that something was off about this game. Jayson Tatum’s first two shot attempts were a weak attempt at a layup that Daniel Gafford easily blocked and then a fast break dunk attempt where he bounced the ball off the front of the rim. After he made a layup, he botched another one, got his own miss, and smoked that bunny too.
Even then, Boston was still within four. They’d already answered an opening 12-4 Dallas run to make it 19-18. Spencer Dinwiddie’s personal 9-3 run threatened to create some early separation but the C’s were still hanging around. But those two Tatum misses, plus a turnover on Boston’s next possession, set up a quick 5-0 spurt and a nine-point deficit heading into the second quarter.
This was the story of the game. Every time the Celtics had a chance to make a little run, they pooched it. They were their own worst enemy, as they often are in games like this. And when that happens, the bits of bad luck that can happen throughout a game get magnified.
"Some games, you ain't gonna win, it's just not your night,” Pritchard said. “We had a lot of bad bounces in certain situations like that. We had a rebound that we should've had and we jumped too early, rattled around and they get an easy put-back. Stuff like that. But again, it's an 82-game season, we ain't gonna be our best every night. But we gotta be in them.”
The Celtics won’t be in a lot of games where they allow 16 points off turnovers and even more in transition off 10 missed layups. At the same time, there aren’t that many games where that's the case.
“(We’re) second in the league in turnover percentage, and we’re top in two-point field-goal percentage,” Joe Mazzulla said. “The process is what we’ve done over the course of - I mean, we’ve played 45 games? So that’s the process, is what we’ve done over the course of the entire season.”
They've played 52, actually, and only lost 16. Yes, 10 of those have been at home, which is weird and something no one can really explain, but there are still many more wins than losses. The problem is the losses feel similar, even if they're aberrations.
So the question then becomes, how do the Celtics treat games like this? Do they blow them off because they're not the norm, or do they take them seriously because they're not the norm?
“you definitely don’t blow it off,” Mazzulla said. “You look at them. You understand where you have to be better. Some of them came because of our spacing, some of them came because of our ball security. So no, you don’t blow it off.
“But from the standpoint of like, what we do - you look to do over the course of a long period of time. … We’ll figure out where we need to get better on those, and then you trust the process of what we’ve done over the course of a 45-game stretch, or whatever it is, that we’ll more times than not be the best version of ourselves.”
This is where the Celtics are. They understand their struggles, they want to fix them, but they also swear that this is the exception rather than the rule. They're coming off a game in Cleveland where they fought through some downturns and stuck with their process. They didn’t give in to the missed shots or blown rotations. They just moved on to the next play.
The Celtics have no choice but to move on to their next game, a Saturday night ABC game at Madison Square Garden. They will undoubtedly be up for a prime time game against a rival, but it will just add to the maddening inconsistency of a roller coaster stretch.
However they finish this portion of the schedule, the hope is that the wild ride will end at the All-Star break. Once they get past that, they can hopefully spend the next 27 games building better habits.
“It's been a long journey, even from last year, so we even just to get a little bit of a mental reset will be good for us,” Brown said. “We just gotta make sure we run through the finish line. We're playing some good basketball. Tonight, first game back off a tough road trip, and our energy wasn’t there and the Mavs kind of just jumped on us to start the game. We just gotta run through the finish line. Nobody is making any excuses. We wasn't as good as we needed to be tonight defensively. We played a little slow. We just gotta keep pushing through the break.”