How are your faces? Do they sting? Did that smack of reality leave a mark?
After a couple of weeks of building hype around a team that had been figuring some things out, piling up a bunch of wins, and climbing in the standings, we were served a stiff power slap on Thursday night in Milwaukee.
We can all take our guesses as to why it happened, but the Celtics second half served as a reminder of how much has to, and has gone, right for the Celtics to win games. It’s as much a notice to pump the brakes as it is a moment to appreciate how well the Celtics have been playing recently.
Part of Boston’s reality check is how much their shooting has helped them climb out of their early hole. Their 3-point percentage through the first 12 games of the season was 33%. They were 5-7 in those games. They followed that up with a 12-game clip at 41.2%, and they went 10-2.
So it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that they found themselves flustered on their way to a 29% shooting night that included 16-straight misses at one point.
“Missing that many 3s in the third quarter and going cold for that long against a team that just caught fire, it’s hard to maintain that level of competition when you're just kind of down that much,” Jordan Walsh told reporters after the game.
The Celtics defense isn’t good enough to handle the kind of pressure their missed shots created, which is another dose of reality. When things are going well and Boston can get back, set their defense, and use their best tools effectively, they can do the things they need to do to win games. When they can’t, they allow the other team’s makes to pile up and the percentages fall out of whack.
Every team faces that tug-of-war in every game, but the Celtics are just more susceptible to big droughts when one thing isn’t going well. The misses mean the defense can’t be its best, which also means that they can’t snap out of funks by getting layups and put-backs by getting out in transition.
Sometimes they just need the other team to miss, but that wasn’t happening much. Walsh has been a revelation as an on-ball defender, but his individual defense can’t help much if he’s sprinting back from a corner trying to catch up to a fast break created by a long rebound off a missed 3-pointer.
And so we are reminded of how thin the margin for error really is for Boston. They have to be disciplined and execute nearly perfectly to snap out of funks. Sometimes, like on the possession that led to three Sam Hauser misses, the perfect execution comes up empty, but that can’t be a reason to abandon it.
Nor can being sucked into trash talking bravado. The beauty of what the Celtics have been doing this season is how much it has been a team effort. The Celtics average 10.4 isolation possessions per game, according to Synergy. And in the first half in Milwaukee, they were only a tick above that pace with seven isolation possessions.
But in the third quarter, the Celtics isolated 11 times. And then they did it another seven times in the fourth. The Bucks dangled the bait, and instead of brushing it off, the Celtics grabbed at it like a striper. Not only that, they were terrible at it.
Their average points per possession on isolation plays is .965 which is seventh in the league. Against Milwaukee, it was .720, which would rank them 29th if it was for the season.
At the Celtics practice on Wednesday, Joe Mazzulla said, “we have a clear understanding of who we are and who we need to be. It's a matter of can we execute that on a daily basis.”
What we saw in Milwaukee is not who the Celtics need to be in order to win games, but it is who they are. They are, and have been, the same flawed roster trying to navigate their weaknesses and find ways to win.
For a couple of weeks, they’ve been everything they need to be in order to achieve that. If the loss in Milwaukee shows us anything, it’s how well the Celtics can play when their focus is constant, they're making the right decisions, and their shots are falling. It showed us that by giving us the worst of Boston’s personality.
We don’t know how impressive their stretches of good play are until we see how bad their worst play can be. And the second half meltdown was as bad as it gets.
But they do, in fact, know who they need to be. And maybe a few days of soaking in the adulation of adoring fans on message boards and chat streams took a bit of the edge off. That's something they need to get back in a hurry, even with three days off before facing the Pistons.
The fact that this loss is disappointing is actually a compliment. This is not a loss that would have surprised me to start the season, but after all they’ve done, I look at it as a bit of a shame. If the Celtics want to keep it that way, they have to get back to the disciplined basketball that got them here.
Three days off might have been enough to knock them off their momentum. Now let’s hope three days off can help them get it back.