Karalis: The Celtics have raised expectations, so nights where they don't deliver are frustrating

One of the best compliments I can give this Celtics team is that losses like this are now annoying. They have set an expectation that this team should win certain games, and that they will execute down the stretch when certain opportunities present themselves. 

They have that expectation of themselves. Jaylen Brown was clearly seething at the late mistakes and missed reads. There were no postgame pleasantries after the final horn. Brown just stomped his way back into the locker room, knowing a winnable game had gotten away. 

“We've been in these situations in the past,” Derrick White told reporters after the game. “I don't know what it is, but it happened tonight, and we just got to learn from it and make sure it don’t happen again.” 

It’s easy to look past the Celtics' deficiencies when they have stretches of everyone playing well and stringing wins together, but they still exist. Neemias Queta has been a huge part of Boston’s success, but he’s still prone to mistakes, like this one that led to a Brown turnover

Queta just didn’t recognize the double team, and he cleared out instead of being a short-roll option for Brown. The result is like watching Drake Maye take a sack because his checkdown decided to run a route 20 yards downfield. 

The Blazers ramped up their intensity, having watched Brown drop 14 points in less than six minutes of the second quarter. They weren’t going to watch him close out the game the same way.

“We were trapping Jaylen Brown the second half, making him get off the ball and making the other guys make plays,” Donovan Clingan said. “I feel like our aggressiveness and closeouts, not letting shooters get off clean shots, I feel like that was a big part of (the win).” 

Brown and White were surprising culprits in Boston’s demise. Portland doubled off a White screen with 1:12 to go which led to another Brown turnover, and then a heated moment where he told White to get out of the screen faster.

You rarely see Brown calling out a teammate like that in real time, on the floor. White shrugs, and maybe that led to the miscommunication at the end of the game when Brown was cutting one way and White thought he was going to the rim. After the game, White took all the heat. 

“It’s just my bad,” he said. “I just got to be better and make sure we’re all on the same page. We gotta get a shot up in those times. So probably those three turnovers there are all my fault, and I gotta be better.” 

Maybe, or maybe White is taking a lot of the heat to be a good teammate. He was certainly not alone in making mistakes. Clingan is only two behind Rudy Gobert for most offensive rebounds in the league this season. He can be a menace if he’s left unchecked, something the Celtics did way too often. 

“We knew one of their weaknesses coming into the game was defensive rebounding,” he said. “So for me, just attacking the glass on both ends and really just … doing whatever I can to help my team win.”

With Boston’s bigs in foul trouble, Boston’s wings had to become small-ball centers, which might have created some advantages to exploit Clingan on the defensive end, but the lack of shot-making let the Blazers off the hook. 

That's really the recurring theme of this loss. The Blazers took risks, and the Celtics botched the counters that would have made the Blazers pay. The Celtics had open looks that they missed. They had reads that only one player was making, or that two players were interpreting differently. 

Everything was right there for them up to a certain point, and then it just wasn’t. 

“For most of the game, I thought our offense, from a process standpoint, was pretty good,” Joe Mazzulla said. “Obviously not at the end of the game and our late-game execution, but give credit to Portland. They played well.” 

The Celtics still aren’t good enough for too many things to go wrong at the same time. And if all the stuff I just laid out happens again, the Celtics will need their supporting cast to bail them out. 

But Jordan Walsh still fouls too much, and he ended up only playing about 10 minutes. Josh Minott is suddenly out of the rotation with his second straight DNP-CD, which means 19-year-old Hugo Gonzalez is getting a bulk of the action. And that's fine on a lot of nights, but he still looks like a rookie sometimes. 

The cherry on top of all this hot garbage sundae is 6-23 shooting from Boston’s three best 3-point shooters (White, Payton Pritchard, Sam Hauser), so they couldn't even shoot their way out of this mess. 

The Celtics were never going to sweep this road trip, so in the end, they can still go home feeling pretty successful if they can win a couple more. And maybe the sting of losing a game where they squandered the chances they were given will help that along. Maybe this will end up being a nice kick in the pants, and they get back to tighter execution. 

It’s nice that the Celtics are in a position where more is expected of them. But the downside to that is that more is expected of them, and so games where this much goes this wrong can’t be brushed off quite as easily.

The bar has been raised.