The Celtics had their chances against the Sixers in their home opener Wednesday night, but they ended up taking the L. Only this time, the L means two things. It was a loss, but it was also a lesson.
A lossen?
No, wait. Let me workshop that a little bit.
Whatever you want to call it, the Celtics were disappointed after the game, but not deterred.
“It's tough,” Jaylen Brown said. “Definitely a winnable game for us. We had some opportunities. Even at the end, we had some opportunities that didn't go our way. It's a learning experience. … We got a bunch of new guys, we're playing a new style. I thought we played hard today. I thought we played a winnable game. We just, you know, some crucial errors that cost us.”
Those errors are to be expected at this point of the season. The Celtics hadn't faced anyone as talented as Tyrese Maxey, nor did they see the type of offensive explosion by VJ Edgecombe, before this game. They haven't faced the pressure of performing together in a tight game that mattered. This was, in reality, the first true test of this version of the Celtics.
“I thought we did good, honestly, until the fourth quarter when they made that run,” Derrick White said. “Obviously, it's the first game and we've got to learn a lot from it. Like, preseason, we didn't really face the starters for the most part, so it was the first game for everybody. They're going to get a lot better, and we've got to get a lot better, too."
That was evident down the stretch when the Celtics saw a seven point lead disappear in a hurry. The Celtics used eight different players in the last five minutes of the game, a testament to the mixing and matching that Joe Mazzulla faces. Of those eight players, only Brown and White were guaranteed to be in at the end of a game last season.
“I feel like the last couple years, we knew exactly what we were trying to get to, so it's going to be a little bit different this year,” White said. “It would be good to learn from this game and see what we did well, what we didn't do well and what actions we want to get into. The best way to learn from it is to go through it, so there will be a lot we can learn from."
Mazzulla didn’t even wait until a morning gathering or hotel film session to watch the end of the game over again. The first thing the Celtics did after the game was go back over what went wrong.
“It was a play for JB to catch on the baseline, but they kind of shadowed it,” Payton Pritchard explained. “I got it, attacked, probably just made the wrong read. Anfernee (Simons) and Sam (Hauser) were open on the back side, so that’s just as pass I’ve got to make.”
Pritchard has rarely been in games to make the pass in that situation. He’s been in plenty of late-game situations as a floor-spacer. He’s been on the floor as an option if Brown or Jayson Tatum needed an outlet.
But as the guy who had to read how much attention he was getting and then make the pass because a defender left someone else to help onto him? That's a new one.
“I think it's obviously a new group, so we're learning new things, new positions,” Pritchard said. “It's also part of a season. You're not going to win all 82. You try to learn from every loss. You try to learn from every win and become the best team at the end of the year.”
Maybe the biggest indicator of how new this team is was the way they handled the loss. There was disappointment, but also a strong understanding of their reality.
After a loss last year, guys would deliver the standard “we’ll watch film, we’ll get better” kind of line. It was a throwaway they used because “we don’t care, this loss doesn’t matter” wouldn’t have been the best thing in the world to say, even if that's how they felt.
This year, they seem earnest in their assessments. They almost seem curious about themselves, as if they are simultaneously standing next to us and watching themselves across from us. They have confidence in the process, but they genuinely seem unsure of where that process will take them.
It’s one of 82, as they say. And even though that one goes in the loss column, they hope the things they can take from it eventually puts more in the win column.
“We got a new group that's still figuring things out,” Brown said. “It's gonna be some ups and downs. But I'm looking forward to just learning every day with the group. And I'm looking forward to when we get to that point where we catch our wind, what that could possibly be.”
