Over the last ten games, the Celtics are 5-5 with clutch losses to the Spurs, Pacers, Bulls, and Pistons. Only the Hawks on Wednesday night really roughed up Boston.
There hasn’t exactly been a statistical drop off from their overachieving regular season.
Poor shooting has bit them in the butt every third game or so, and they’ve put up some stinkers of late. But really, they’ve just been the victim of some hot shooting of late: a 21-of-45 avalanche in a three-point loss to the Bulls, the Pacers uncharacteristically hitting 16-of-37 in a two-point loss, and the Hawks making 18-of-42 in a blinding display on Wednesday.
There were some marked free throw disparities in the mix too, notably only four trips to the line against the Spurs and then just 9 two days later in Indiana and 9 again against the Bulls last week. But then again, that’s the way the league has been trending for the last month or so.
The .500 record could just be the product of a late-January swoon or the basketball gods tipping the scale one way or another. As Joe Mazzulla put it after a thorough thrashing by the Hawks, it was just a “bad day at the office.”
Maybe it was. Maybe it was just a motivated Atlanta team exacting revenge after the Celtics hung 132 ten days prior in State Farm Arena.
Or maybe it wasn’t.
“Honestly, we just guard the ball well,” Nickeil Alexander-Walker explained after seemingly stumping the now slumping Celtics. “We did a better job of staying in front, staying out of rotation. The last few games, like they were getting clean looks off screens and we were a step behind, step slow. We weren’t as physical. Tonight was. It was a two-way street like just up in the physicality as a whole, and then allowing us to be more, I would say, allowing us to be more aggressive.”
With a long and rangy trio of Alexander-Walker, Dyson Daniels, and Jalen Johnson as point-of-attack defenders, the Hawks were able to blow up a lot of the Celtics early actions between Payton Pritchard (5-of-11, zero assists), Derrick White (5-of-13, three assists), and Jaylen Brown, and generate sixteen turnovers.
And you have to think that there’s a throughline between that Hawks defense and the Celtics’ 3-1 record against the beast of the East, Detroit Pistons. While the -11 total point differential over those four games suggests a close matchup between them, the eye test shows Boston’s struggle with the ball pressure.
Zoom out and the Celtics are still just a fraction away from having the most efficient offense in the league, second to only the Nuggets. That’s certainly a feather in Mazzulla’s cap given the circumstances entering the season. However, with the trade deadline on the horizon and Jayson Tatum’s impending decision to return, it has to give the front office and coaching staff a moment of reflection that come playoff time when the games become a little more physical and handsy, what are Boston’s realistic chances in raising Banner 19?
