The Boston Celtics blew a 30-point lead to the Atlanta Hawks. They got their 10-game win streak snapped. They completely lost focus.
They scored 44 points in the first quarter and 44 points in the second half. All of that is true. And none of it will matter in two weeks.
What will matter in two weeks is Boston’s crunch-time offense, and once again, it devolved into isolation basketball against Atlanta.
With 40 seconds left in the game, down by one point, Jaylen Brown dribbled the ball on the wing. He waited and waited and waited, but the Celtics’ play never materialized. As a result, he chucked up a contested three as the shot clock ran out. It missed.
“I didn’t love the last shot that we got,” Brown said. “I think we kind of waited too late. I was waiting for the action to kind of develop. But the clock was winding down, it was taking too much time.”
Brown and Jayson Tatum made some big-time mid-range buckets down the stretch out of one-on-one matchups. To their credit, the Celtics attacked the mismatches they wanted to and found their spots
They found success with some simple screens, but as soon as their initial plan got shut down, they froze.
When the ball is zipping around, players are setting screens away from the play and keeping the defense on their toes, the Celtics have an advantage. When the offense gets bogged down, the defense gets locked in, and players have time to react to what’s in front of them, Boston often forces up a bad look out of necessity.
But the Celtics didn’t see offense as their biggest problem, rather, their defense led to offensive difficulties.
“I think that they just had time to set their defense,” Tatum said. “They kept scoring. We didn’t get as many stops as we did at the beginning of the game. So, those situations come about a lot of times when you’re playing against a set defense, obviously because they were scoring, and we weren’t getting as many stops as we would have liked.”
Boston actually seemed pleased with their late-game offensive execution.
“I think we were pretty decent,” Kristaps Porzingis said. “I think JT was doing a great job getting some buckets for us. I think we could have been smarter in a couple of situations on defense. We gave them easy free throws.”
That’s all true.
Boston couldn’t stop Atlanta in the last three minutes of the game. They were foul machines.
The Hawks got points on all five possessions they got down the stretch. Whether it was from free throws or an offensive rebound, they found a way to score.
The one time the Celtics got a board after a missed free throw, they followed it up with a Tatum turnover that led to a Bogdan Bogdanovic three-pointer.
Atlanta got a chance to set up their defense in the half-court every time, making life more difficult for the Celtics. But that’s not an excuse for iso-ball.
Why settle for non-action off the ball? Spacing is important, but when the Hawks blow up two screens in a row and leave Brown floundering on the wing, why say, ‘Dang, I guess we’ll just go iso now’?”
The solution is to get into the play quicker, which Brown admitted as an issue, but even so, when the Celtics find matchups they like, that’s almost always the end of the possession. They live and die with he mismatch as everyone else on the court stands and watches as if they bought a ticket to the game.
This is how Boston runs almost their entire offense. In the early stages of the game, Tatum is usually able to crack the defense and find an open shooter. But as the game progresses and teams get less and less willing to leave their guys, Tatum is often forced to put up tough mid-range shots.
He and Brown made things happen against the Hawks, except on what was the most important offensive possession of the game, but the general concept is senseless.
Maybe the Celtics are hiding their cards, saving their drawn-out sets for the playoffs. Maybe this is Joe Mazzulla’s way of getting Tatum and Brown some late-game, tough-shot reps in before the postseason. Maybe they are comfortable living and dying with their stars in the final minutes.
Again, this game didn’t matter, but those inquiries do.
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