The Celtics took the night off from being the surprising second seed we’ve gotten to know. The unflappable and precise Celtics led by a hyperefficient MVP candidate wiped off their stage makeup, stepped out of their costumes, and finished their Wednesday night loss to Denver looking more like the team we saw struggle in October.
“I think we were on top of each other a little bit,” Jaylen Brown said after the game. “Our spacing wasn’t great. Stuff that we just got to clean up.”
You can easily file this game under the umbrella of ‘stuff happens.’ No team is going to be perfect for 82 games, especially a team in Boston’s situation. They have been great so far this season, but they are still a team that needs most things to go right in order to win.
And they were getting that for most of the game. Denver was certainly hitting a ton of shots, But the Celtics were keeping pace themselves. Boston led by three heading into the fourth quarter because they were getting into the paint, giving themselves second chances, and the turnovers were almost even.
But then …
“We had some empty possessions on offense,” Joe Mazzulla said, referencing Boston’s 9-26 shooting in the final quarter, which included a nearly five-minute scoreless stretch. “They did a good job vs. our aggressive pick-and-roll coverages finding the 2-on-1, whether it was knocking down the threes or hitting the roll man. They did a good job executing on the offensive end.”
The Celtics did not match that execution. They turned the ball over five times over the final eight minutes of the game, three of them by Brown when Boston needed him to take over the game. With the Nuggets up 99-90, he committed an offensive foul. At 103-93, he got stripped on his way to the basket. At 109-98, he rose up for a jump shot, was challenged, and threw the ball out of bounds hoping to find a teammate to bail him out.
For Brown, it was a return to bad habits that generally arise when he loses focus.
“I normally