Tonight’s column is brought to you by ipecac. Ipecac - when you have ingested poison, but watching Celtics-Bulls as a remedy isn’t an option.
TD Garden is generally one of the league’s better environments. Yes, the jumbotron is used to get fans to cheer and chant, but it’s often not necessary. The crowd is generally invested in the games, and they have a good feel for when the team needs a boost.
But it was so quiet inside the arena for most of the night that I swear you could hear individual conversations. Maybe fans were sitting on their hands to keep them warm inside a frigid building, but the Celtics and Bulls gave fans nothing for a large portion of the night, other than shooting just as cold as the air seeping in from the outside.
“I think we kind of understood going coming into the game, like, how tough a game it was going to be, mentally and physically, just coming off a long road trip, coming from the West Coast, practically be on the plane all day,” Anfernee Simons admitted. “And we knew that it was a possibility that we might struggle a little bit offensively, but I think defensively, through the most of the first half, I think we played great. We were getting stops and making it a game. And I think that's what helped us.”
It might be a bit generous to suggest the Celtics defense was the primary driver of Chicago’s empty offensive possessions, but misses are misses, and the Celtics were able to end most of the Bulls’ empty possessions by clearing the rebounds. And where Chicago was unable to give themselves more than one bite at the apple, the Celtics were piling up second chances left and right.
“They didn't look very good out there, but they played hard,” Joe Mazzulla said after the game. “I was not pleased with how they looked, but I was pleased with how they tried and how they played and how they competed. But they looked relatively tired.”
They do get marks for fighting through the fatigue. No one goes on a business trip to five cities over 10 days, flies home across the country, and then walks into work Monday rarin’ to go. But they did what they needed to do.
“I mean, they’re just relentless in terms of attacking the glass,” Bulls guard Coby White said. “Like, one time I gave up one, I checked, and Derrick White was just standing there, so then the shot goes up, so I checked, he was standing there, and I looked at the shot, and he’s like damn near out of bounds, and like ran back into the play and got a board, the ball bounced right to him. So, I feel like they’re just really savvy at it.”
Brains and effort can make up for a lot in basketball. The Celtics have perfected the art of tracking down long misses, crashing to the free throw line area from the corners to snag shots that sail over an opponent’s head. Mazzulla loves to talk about tendencies, and this is one that they’ve nailed down.
“I used to always be the first guy back,” Simons said. “Now, I'm in the corner a lot more, spacing the floor (and) I … run through the free throw line. I found myself a couple times, the ball coming right to me. It's just those types of plays. Finding ways to give us another possession. It helped out a lot today. Got me a couple 3s, Payton (Pritchard) a couple 3s. Just those offensive rebounds helped us a lot just to give us extra possessions."
Simons came up with two offensive rebounds, which is a lot for a guy averaging 0.4 per game. He had 14 total coming into this game, so his two represented about 14% of his season’s output. And extra chances mean extra opportunities for someone on this team to get hot, which Simons was also able to do.
Mazzulla never really wanted to acknowledge the hot shooting, though, without tying it to the defense and hustle. Every question about figuring out how to persevere until the shooting caught up was met with stats about forcing turnovers and creating second chances.
That's how the Celtics won the game, and that's how Simons made his mark. 27 second-half points puts him in the same scoring class as Jaylen Brown’s 30 point second half against the Clippers. And similarly, Simons had to do the other things in the game to make sure the scoring packed the biggest punch.
“Each game is something different,” he said about being part of winning basketball in Boston. “Obviously, I know I can come in and be aggressive and try to score the ball. (It’s also) the little things, whether it's crashing the glass or guarding my man.
“I think it's been fun, kind of implementing myself into, you know, this culture that's been set and the expectations that's been set already as well … I feel like I've grown so much in a lot of areas, just mentally, and how to approach each and every game. Just the attention to detail and the intensity that we know we play each and every night. That’s the standard that's been set. And so I've been pretty pleased with myself. And then obviously the team, how much we've been taking on that challenge, it's been showing.”