While his team has hit some turbulence, Celtics coach Joe Mazzulla isn’t pressing the panic button. In the moments after Sunday night’s double overtime loss to the Knicks, Mazzulla took a question about his concern level and quickly interjected.
“Zero,” he said.
Still, the Celtics understand there are issues to address. While the teams around them in the Eastern Conference look to be trending up, the Celtics have been veering in a different direction since returning from the All-Star break. Their 3-point shooting isn’t generating the same success it once did. Their focus has been lacking during some alarming stretches, including back-to-back losses in which they’ve blown double-digit leads. They’ve been maddeningly inconsistent on both sides of the ball.
Zero concern, maybe, but nothing that can be ignored – especially at this stage of the season.
“I guess I would say that we’re not locking in as much as we need to,” Al Horford said. “This is the second time that we kind of have a lead, we feel good about it, a team makes a run and we just kind of let them back in the game. And throughout the season, you’re gonna have adversity. We’ve played pretty good basketball most of the year, and this is a time where you tighten up, you fix some of these things, some of these issues, or it goes the other way.”
At this point last season, the Celtics were continuing their second-half surge that led them to the NBA Finals but those vibes are noticeably absent now. They’ve fallen out of first place in the Eastern Conference – now 1.5 games back of the Bucks entering Monday – and the race for the top seed is something Mazzulla knows is there whether it’s a priority or not. With 17 regular-season games remaining, their struggles are being magnified but the coach isn’t trying to overreact to it.
“The only thing you can control is you try to win the games and so, we put ourselves in the best possible chance to win,” Mazzulla said. “Zero concern. Just because there are 17 games left doesn’t mean that there is any difference in how a stretch of the season would go. You obviously want to be playing your best basketball later in the season as you get closer to the playoffs, but this is a tough stretch and whatever this stretch has, we have to learn from it so that we can use it later in the year.”
While the Celtics’ problems could be traced back to at least last Monday, when they were blown out by the Knicks in New York in a horrific shooting performance, the issues of the last two games – in which they blew two big leads – may be more alarming. They coughed up a 28-point lead in Friday night’s loss to the Nets and two nights later, blew a 14-point third-quarter lead to the Knicks. The C’s went down by 11 before fighting back to force two overtimes, but it shouldn’t have got to that point.
Jayson Tatum said he believes the Celtics have been “thinking too much” when things go wrong over their last two games, and that’s snowballed.
“I think getting frustrated about what just happened on defense, now you’re thinking about something else when you shoot the ball and now you don’t have that same rhythm, and then you start to miss shots,” Tatum said. “And human nature plays a part in missing shots, they’re making shots, things aren’t necessarily going your way. We’ve just got to do a better job of moving on to the next play, good or bad, forgetting what just happened. I would say the last two games we haven’t done a great job of that.”
Added Tatum: “We haven’t played well. We played better today than we did last game. But overall, still had a great year. I think we’ve just hit a little rough patch, which is fine. We would like to win every game coming out of the break, but probably wasn’t going to happen. We’re still in a great position and we still got time to figure it out – and we’re going to. Some minor things, but we know what we’re capable of.”
Derrick White said the Celtics have to get their swagger back again. Tatum agreed.
“We gotta get our groove back, which I’m confident we will and get back to being ourselves and playing with that swagger on both ends of the floor for 48 minutes,” Tatum said.
Horford said the struggles have been frustrating because the Celtics, for the majority of the year, have continued to play through these kinds of struggles but haven’t had that same mindset over the last two games. But they believe they’ll right the ship. As the playoffs near, some urgency may be required.
“The character of our group, the kind of guys that we have, I feel pretty confident that we’ll figure it out,” Horford said. “Obviously, you don’t want to drag this out, type thing. And I’ve said earlier, we want to play our best basketball like you said, but, this is the part of the season, there is ups, there’s downs, and within games we’re playing well then we kind of go in a rut, seem like we can’t get out of it. We have to stay the course, and I feel like we’ll be fine. But definitely it’s not pleasant to go through this right now.”