BOSTON – Jayson Tatum stood toe-to-toe with Onyeka Okongwu. Jaylen Brown stepped over to support his teammate. And, as referees and security guards tried to separate the Celtics and Atlanta Hawks, Joe Mazzulla clapped his hands repeatedly while he walked from the sideline to enter the scrum.
In overtime Saturday night, near the end of a 119-115 loss filled with costly mental errors, Mazzulla loved seeing the verve from his side. He enjoyed how his team entered the fight, though he didn’t specify whether he meant that literally or figuratively. He said he generally considers showing such spirit important.
“I was just excited to have some conflict and controversy,” Mazzulla said. “I think that builds us together.”
After the loss dropped the Celtics to 8-8 over their last 16 games, Mazzulla said he plans to embrace the fight to propel his team out of its recent slump. Though Boston’s struggles have shown no signs of letting up, he said “this is the fun part” for him.
“There is no fear,” Mazzulla said. “I’m actually more excited at this juncture of the season than I was at the beginning.”
Mazzulla thought the Celtics played one of their “better, spirited, mentally tough games” from a competitive standpoint, but acknowledged they blew the game by failing to execute down the stretch. Jrue Holiday pinned the loss on himself after committing two crushing blunders late in regulation, but other Boston players could have done the same for their own late-game failures. Tatum missed a free throw with 7.9 seconds in regulation that would have extended the Celtics’ lead to three points; bricked a jump shot at the end of regulation that would have given his team the win; failed to corral a key defensive rebound after Jalen Johnson missed two crunch-time free throws; and front-rimmed a 3-pointer that would have tied the game during the final seconds of overtime. Brown was blocked on a floater with the Celtics trailing by a point late in overtime, then threw an ill-advised turnover after retrieving the rebound.
Boston could have potentially escaped with a win if any of those plays had gone the other way. Instead, the team’s drought continued.
“I guess my question when I’m always in situations like this is, like, what do you expect?” Mazzulla said. “Like, do you expect that when you do something as a team, you just expect it to just go well for you all the time? I always ask myself that in situations like this. I use some expletives before that, but I’m like, ‘What the f— do you expect?’ Like, did you expect we were just going to have another 65-win season, and we were just never going to make mistakes? Or if you’re going to bring back, if you have the same team and a group of guys that are doing something together, that we’re going to show our ass from time to time? Like, what – not you personally – what do we expect? And that’s why it’s a part of the journey there.”
One month into Boston’s most challenging stretch of the last two seasons, Mazzulla expressed full support for his locker room. He said the Celtics need to fix the details that have held them back recently, but declared they will do just that. He said he believes in the character and the mindset and the preparation of his team. He said he has “the utmost trust in how they carry themselves.”
“There’s not a group of people that I wouldn’t rather go through something difficult together with,” Mazzulla said. “So again, sign me up (for going through this rough spell). Doesn’t mean I’m happy, but this is the thought process about how we’re going to go about it.”
Boston had chance after chance to put away the Hawks, but could not do so. After opening an 11-point first-quarter lead, the Celtics missed 10 of their first 11 shots in the second quarter. They finished the period shooting 5 for 21 from the field, including 0 for 8 on 3-point attempts, with six turnovers. On their way to one of their most hideous offensive stretches all season, they botched multiple fast breaks, failed to identify mismatches and committed a number of baffling decisions.
A back-and-forth sequence one minute into the second quarter epitomized the Celtics’ careless play late in the first half. They had a three-on-one opportunity, but Payton Pritchard turned down an open 3-pointer to find Sam Hauser near the low block and Hauser airmailed an alley-oop too high for Tatum to convert. Five seconds after the turnover, a steal gave the Celtics another chance in transition. Hauser pitched the ball ahead to Tatum, but the five-time All-Star botched a layup. Instead of hustling back on defense, he stayed close to the referee to complain until he picked up a technical foul. Tatum would have put the Celtics defense in a bad spot if the referee had allowed the play to continue.
Even after all of the crunch-time difficulties, Mazzulla pointed back to the second quarter as a damaging stretch for his team.
“Yeah, we had a chance to win, and we didn’t execute it,” Mazzulla said. “That’s a fact. But we also had a 15-point quarter in the second quarter because it was a little bit of our spacing, our execution, and we missed shots. And so the low-hanging fruit is to focus on those last few plays, which, yeah, are important. You have to execute those and we didn’t. But there are still plenty of plays throughout that we could get better at in a close game like that, that we have to learn from, and the second quarter is another one of those things.”
The Celtics have experienced some suspect end-of-game execution recently, especially late in a 120-119 win against the Pelicans on Jan. 12. Boston escaped all of the problems down the stretch in that one, but couldn’t do so against the Hawks. Holiday might have been smart to pass up an open layup with about 17 seconds left to run out more clock, but committed a turnover seconds later with a bad pass to Brown. Moments after that, Holiday fouled Trae Young near halfcourt with the Celtics ahead by two points. The way Holiday fouled Young, tugging on his arm, almost made it look like Holiday forgot the score and wanted to intentionally foul, but he said he didn’t mean to do it.
“Today it was just execution,” Holiday said. “I think we had the game won. I’ve got to make some better plays. Make a better pass to JB, or maybe if I hold onto the ball, get free throws, it’s a different situation. I don’t foul Trae, we’re still up two. So this game is on me, and execution on my part has to be better.”
The Celtics must lift their execution back up to what it used to be. As confounding as some of their recent woes have been, Tatum said the troubles could benefit them later in the season.
“You’ve just gotta take the good with the bad and understand that down the line, down the road, that you could be grateful for the stretch that we’re going through,” Tatum said. “If we stick together, if we continue to be a close-knit group, then we’ll figure it out together. We come out on the other side of this, we’ll feel a lot better about ourselves. So I’m certain that we’ll learn some things from it. We’ll be better once we get rolling again.”
(Photo: Maddie Malhotra/Getty Images)
