“Welcome to the NBA,” Joe Mazzulla said with a smile as he walked toward the podium for his postgame press conference following his team’s 114-105 loss to the Los Angeles Lakers.
His team fell flat on their face Thursday night.
While there is no such thing as a ‘sure’ win in the NBA, facing a Lakers team with a 7-17 road record that was missing LeBron James and Anthony Davis, this was a game the Celtics undoubtedly should’ve won.
Instead, the Celtics suffered one of their worst losses of the season, rightfully earning boos from the TD Garden crowd.
The Celtics came out and flat, and they paid for it. Boston turned the ball over nine times in the opening frame, their highest total in any quarter this season, resulting in eight points for the visitors. The Celtics also surrendered 10 offensive rebounds in the quarter, resulting in five second-chance points.
Although Boston had plenty of chances to make up ground, even reclaiming the lead in the second quarter, the first quarter provides a proper synopsis of the game – Los Angeles simply wanted it more.
“We didn’t play as hard as they did,” Mazzulla admitted postgame. “They played inspired.”
Behind 32 points from Austin Reaves and a near triple-double from D’Angelo Russell (16 points, 14 assists, and eight rebounds), the purple and gold ran the Celtics off the TD Garden parquet. Los Angeles finished with six players in double-figures and knocked down 19 of their 36 three-point attempts (52.8%).
That’s stuff we’re accustomed to seeing from the Celtics.
However, Boston’s starting five struggled in a way we haven’t seen this season, registering a -14 on the night, their worst mark of the season. The collection of stars combined for just 65 points on 27-of-68 (39.7%) shooting from the field, 7-of-27 (25.9%) from deep, and 14 turnovers.
Quick math: The starting five had twice as many turnovers as they made threes. Reaves alone knocked down as many triples as the starting five combined.
“Tonight was a rough night. We take full responsibility for it,” Jaylen Brown said postgame. “It started with that first group. We weren’t very good tonight. We came out lackadaisical. It’s the NBA. If you come out with that mentality, you can lose. And that’s what we did. We lost.”
That they did. In embarrassing fashion.
The loss punctuated the worst week of the season for the Celtics. It began Saturday night when the Celtics fell to the Clippers by 19, a game in which Boston led for just 3:35. Despite securing victories in the subsequent two games, they were hard-fought.
On Monday against the New Orleans Pelicans, the Celtics faced a 17-point deficit before making a comeback for the win. Then, on Tuesday night, Boston relinquished a 20-point second-quarter lead and another 12-point fourth-quarter lead to the Indiana Pacers but managed to secure the victory.
“We’re not playing well. To me, you can’t run from that. That’s just the way that it is. It’s going to happen,” Mazzulla said following the loss to the Lakers. “There are five teams in the NBA that have went what, 73-10, 73-9? Like that doesn’t happen very often. You are going to have tough stretches. You can’t run from that. We’re not playing good basketball right now.”
It’s an 82-game season. No team is immune to bad stretches of basketball, and the reality is when evaluating this Celtics’ season, these stretches have been few and far between.
“It just happens. Stretches of bad basketball happen,” Mazzulla added. “You work your butt off every day to minimize those, but stretches of bad basketball happen. We can’t sit here and act like we’re too entitled for it to happen to us. It happens, and it’s a matter of how we respond to it, and can we work through it?”
For the most part, the Celtics have worked quite nicely throughout their losses. After all, they haven’t lost back-to-back games since the first week of November and are 10-1 following a loss this season.
“I anticipated at some point during the season a tough stretch of basketball for our team,” said Mazzulla. “If anybody here didn’t think that was going to happen, then what are we doing? It’s a matter of how we work through it.”
It would be foolish to expect otherwise. While the execution and effort Thursday night are undoubtedly frustrating, there will be games like that in the NBA calendar. It’s inevitable. The Celtics know they aren’t playing as well as they can right now and aren’t running away from it.
“Just a bad week at work,” Jayson Tatum said. “Everybody in here got a job. Nobody has great days every day. We’re no different. This is our job. We would love to be perfect. We would love to win every game and make every shot, but it’s just not the case. We’ve gotta be better and look ourselves in the mirror.”
Earlier this week, Mazzulla said he wants his team to face a bit of adversity, to have to grind out wins. Noting that sometimes it feels like the Celtics should just be winning games, but that’s not the case in the NBA.
Although losing games is never fun, the coach is onto something. To get to where the Celtics want to be, they need to be battle-tested, and sometimes, the best way to learn is from your failures.
“You win, or you learn. You learn more from your losses, 100 percent,” Kristaps Porzingis said.
This stretch doesn’t define the 2023-24 Celtics. It’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day results, but that’s a dangerous way to live in the NBA, or any professional sport, for that matter.
“This is the NBA. This is almost like a script. You’re going to lose this type of game, and fans are going to think it’s the end of the world, and we lost to the Lakers without AD and LeBron, like, end of the season. Boom. Done,” Porzingis said.
“But it’s just a loss. It’s just a loss which we have to learn from. And which we will. We’re going to get a couple of days rest, which I think a lot of guys especially will be really useful for, and we bounce back hungry and full of energy.”
If losing two out of four games is considered a ‘slump,’ that’s not too bad. What matters is the accountability within the team. They don’t seem to think they’re immune to the impact of past mistakes.
Again, losses are never fun, but this could serve as the wake-up call the team needed as we grind out the dog days of the season.
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