The first game back after a long road trip is supposed to be tough, but it was impossible for this year’s Celtics team.
How bad was it? Here are some numbers courtesy of C’s radio play-by-play man Sean Grande:
- They have played five games after three or more games on the road and lost them all with a -10.6 differential.
- The Celtics allowed 1.279 points per possession in these five losses, which would be the worst defense in the league. They have allowed 1.108 PPP in their other 32 home games, which would make them a top-five defense.
- The 1.442 points per possession allowed in this game goes down as Boston’s worst defensive performance in the play-by-play era.
What the hell is going on?
“I don’t know,” Derrick White answered when asked why these games are a problem. “You’re on the road and kind of just relaxing. You come back home and life is – I don’t know, I wish I had an answer. Luckily that was our last long road trip of the year and we can try to figure that out next year.”
That last part is the good news. They have a road back-to-back next week, and then every trip after that will be to just one city.
That's nice and all, but avoiding a problem doesn’t solve it. And even if solving it doesn’t become a priority until pumpkin spice season, there's still a curiosity factor about it right now.
"Yeah, it's definitely just an adjustment,” Luke Kornet said, taking his own crack at trying to explain the phenomenon. “A lot of the time you're glad to get home and glad to get back. It's kind of hard to say, who really knows? I feel like there's part of being on the road that's a little bit of like a stressed environment of being on the road. And then you get home and honestly just happy to get back to the family and stuff like that. But frankly, that's not really an excuse for nights like tonight. We need to do a better job of figuring that out and winning those games."
Uh huh. Well, that was no help.
I think what these guys are trying to say is that on the road, it’s easy to focus on the games because there isn’t much else to do all day. A road trip, especially like the one the Celtics were just on, is kind of a non-stop grind of being in specific places at specific times with no one but your teammates. If they're not traveling on non-game days, they're in a hotel room, a film session, or a restaurant.
There's a lot of time to focus on basketball and to get some alone time, away from real life at home. By the end of the trip, though, no amount of charter planes or five-star hotels can keep things from getting old. Getting home after all of that means you just get to crash in your own bed and try to decompress. You feel like you’ve run a long race and you just crossed the finish line, except you have to go back to work a day later.
“Those first games back, that’s always a tough one just from a calibration standpoint,” Jaylen Brown said. “We’ve been in three different time zones. You’ve been away from home. You just get home and kind of get settled, and then you have to play a basketball game … We don’t make excuses, but first game back off a long road trip is always tough.”
Let's be fair here for a minute. The first of these games was a six-point loss to the Golden State Warriors in early November with Neemias Queta starting at center and Jaylen Brown sitting out. There was also a two-point loss to the Houston Rockets in January where Dillon Brooks went 10-15 from 3. They had bad losses to the Kings and Mavs, both of which were just gross.
This game was also gross, but they were also missing Jrue Holiday, Kristaps Porzingis, and Al Horford, and Brown is figuring out a knee issue. It doesn’t help matters that this game was meaningless in the grand scheme of their season. Of course, the 19,000-plus fans there might offer a counterpoint that the money they spent on their tickets means a great deal, which is a valid argument. However, the human nature element at play here trumps all.
These games have been tough for decades. Last season, when the Celtics were much more motivated to prove something in the regular season, they powered through and did well. They're just not doing the same this season. It doesn’t mean they can’t, it’s just that they don’t. And even though this game does nothing to change the standings for them, it doesn’t mean they don’t care.
“I mean, we’re all pissed,” Joe Mazzulla said. “We all hate losing. And that was my message. It was a good reminder that losing still sucks. So I love the fact that the staff are all miserable. Guys are pissed. Not happy about it, but we’ve got to come back and do it again the next day. I think it’s great. Like you said, at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter or have much of an impact, but it still sucks, and we’re all miserable right now. So we’ll get back after it the next day.”
