The Boston Celtics beat the New York Knicks by 18 on Friday night in New York …
… if you don’t count the second quarter.
As much as we’d all like to forget a 42-14 embarrassment that goes down as literally the worst quarter a Celtics team has ever played, all 48 minutes count.
The Celtics are the anti-Thunder to start this season. Where OKC has played 116 minutes of basketball over two double-overtime games, the Celtics have basically played more like 72.
Is there a way Brad Stevens can trade Boston’s bad 24 minutes for OKC’s good 20?
I’m being told that's also not allowed, which means the Celtics have to fix this mess themselves.
“You have to build the habit of executing that discipline,” Joe Mazzulla said after the loss. “No one has played a perfect, 48-minute game. I thought last game maybe we played 12 to 16 minutes of the way that we need to play on both ends. And I thought it was closer to 24 (tonight). We just have to continue to get that number up as high as possible, and it's just the effort and the details and the discipline.”
Effort waxes and wanes during a game. When things are going a team’s way, the effort tends to increase because everyone is hyped and they want the ball back to go score again. But when something is going wrong, in this case the utter lack of rebounding, frustration can seep in like water finding its way through a crack. If you don’t catch it in time, you have a serious problem.
The Celtics cut a 24-point Knicks lead down to 10 with six minutes to go in the game. That's an easy comeback to make if a team can focus and execute. Instead, this happened.
“We got to get a little bit more nasty on the glass,” Jaylen Brown said. “I think that was a big deflator for us. Every time we went on a run while we were coming back, we gave up an offensive rebound. So we got to find out how to be more consistent in that manner.”
Boston’s defensive rebounding percentage against the Knicks was just 54.5%. The worst team in the NBA last season rebounded 67.8% of opponent misses. The best team rebounded 73.4%. So the gap between the worst and the best last season was 5.6%. The gap between Boston in this game and last year’s worst was 13.3%.
That was such a nerdy way to say a team absolutely sucked at something that I just stole my own lunch money. Sort of like the way New York stole any chance Boston had to win this game.
“We have to combat (the rebounding problem) in three ways,” Mazzulla said. "We have to be as physical as we can rebounding. We have to get offensive rebounds, and we have to force more turnovers. So it's a three-thing approach to getting that …
“I think if you look at those four categories, defensive rebounding, offensive rebounding, forcing turnovers, not turning it over, we probably have a better chance at controlling three out of the four of those with our effort and our ability to control those things, so we got to fight for those.”
There's an admission in that last sentence. Boston will never be a good rebounding team. They don’t have the personnel, and they play a very aggressive defensive style that leaves them susceptible to being out of position. They know where their strengths lie, and it’s not going to be clearing every rebound in the world. They just can’t be god awful.
They were so bad in this game that rebounding at the rate of last year’s worst defensive rebounding team would have gotten them seven more rebounds. A mediocre rate of somewhere between 70% and 71%, would have meant eight or nine more defensive boards.
That would at least give Boston a chance. Then they could lean on the other three things Mazzulla mentioned to win a game.
Not that those were much better in New York. The Celtics did force 20 turnovers, but they could only score 16 points off those. Boston committed 16 turnovers, which isn’t terrible, but it netted the Knicks 23 points.
The rebounding issues give Boston very little margin for error in these other areas. Accepting their reality is one thing, but committing to the other elements of the game have to go with it.
“This is a good test for us to kind of see where we're at,” Brown said. “Today wasn't our best outing. We were a little bit out of sync. The spacing wasn't great. So we just got to figure out how to put 48 minutes together. So it's urgency, for sure, but it's also patience with this group.”
It’s early and a tough start was to be expected. The Celtics are saying all the right things about what’s been happening. Now it’s a matter of doing them.