There’s “structured chaos,” the fast-paced playstyle Celtics coach Joe Mazzulla preached through training camp and preseason, and then there’s just plain old messy. Boston looked like the latter against Philadelphia to open their 2025-26 season and they paid for it in a 117-116 loss.
Give the new-look Celtics credit for being in the fight, but they have a lot to clean up to compete this year.
The most immediate area of concern has to be defense. This group was never going to match the talent lost when players like Jrue Holiday departed last summer, but they won’t be able to survive many games sending the other team to the line 15 times in two quarters the way they did with Philly in the first half. The Celtics surrendered an average of just under 18 free throw visits to their opponents per game last season. By the fourth quarter, they had their hands full trying, (and mostly failing), to contain Tyrese Maxey in transition, and finished the night having given up 30 free throw attempts.
"I don't know if we were too focused on the offensive end, but we can't let guys just come in here and do what they want," Jaylen Brown said after the loss.
Like defense, a lot of the other pieces that looked off for the Celtics were predictable. They don’t have a true starting big, and they’re really going to continue to struggle if Neemias Queta fouls like he did in Game 1. Throwing a bunch of a young, unproven guys together makes for weird chemistry early in the season, and especially so when ten different dudes rotate onto the floor in the first quarter.
Notably, Boston had four offensive fouls, including one costly late-game illegal screen. Coach Joe Mazzulla hesitated to attribute that disconnect to the personnel of the team.
“Obviously you’re looking at the relationship between the ball-handler and the five man, and setting up screens, and whatnot,” Mazzulla said postgame. “But those [illegal screens] are going to happen the entire season, just with the physicality of the play, and trying to set screens. That’s not, like, the rustiness of the first game. That’s just something we have to continue to be great at.”
Boston looked the best when Brown and Derrick White were in together – which again, is no surprise. But the drop-off in competitiveness when they sat was uncomfortable. Which brings up another point.
Who should have the ball in the final seconds of a one-score game?
Mazzulla said the emphasis was to get the ball into “the playmaker’s hands” for a chance at the end of regulation, but should that have been Payton Pritchard, last year’s Sixth Man of the Year, for two different opportunities? He had just hit a 3-pointer to bring Boston within one point of the Sixers with moments left, but was that enough to allow him to dictate that much control over their fate, especially when Brown and White had engineered the success the Celtics found in the third quarter? Pritchard also finished with the worst shooting stat line of the entire team, 1-7, despite going 3-4 from behind the arc. Giving Pritchard multiple looks in the paint just doesn't compute there, and it was a look for which Philadelphia was willing to settle. Postgame, White said the play was meant for Brown and tried to get the ball to him, but the Sixers' defense prevented it, and he ultimately "trusted P."
One area where the Celtics found themselves very fortunate was not having to answer the question of how to cover opposing big men without a formidable figure of their own. Joel Embiid was a complete nonfactor for Philadelphia. He looked absolutely unrecognizable from his MVP-caliber self just a few years ago.
Logic dictates this team will improve with more experience, both at an individual level, for guys emerging from smaller roles elsewhere in the league, like Josh Minott, and at as a group learning one another. But to get to a more competitive place, they may need a firmer coaching hand in-game from Mazzulla, whether that’s timeouts like the shot in the arm he gave them in the first half, or drawing up plays for one-score scenarios like his mentor, Brad Stevens.
Mazzulla has shown his capacity for analytics and finding marginal advantages. This team will need that edge to a much greater capacity than his previous rosters. But some things are also just common sense. As he said, of the fourth quarter:
“If you give up 42, you probably give up a little bit of everything.”