The Boston Celtics’ Jayson Tatum looks on against the Detroit Pistons during their February 26 … [+]
On Wednesday, the Boston Celtics suffered maybe their most surprising loss of the season, getting blown out by the Detroit Pistons 117-97. It was stunning considering that Boston was on a roll, having won ten of its last 11 games. It was a brutal wake-up call, but perhaps a needed one for a Celtics team that is sometimes its own worst enemy.
The not-so secret “secret” about the NBA is that for the elite teams, the regular season often doubles as an extended preseason. Obviously, a team needs to do well to qualify for the postseason and conference standings absolutely do matter (especially for teams like the Pistons who are trying to avoid the play-ins).
For a team like the Celtics, the individual games may appear to be less meaningful at this point in the season. After their blowout win against the New York Knicks, who struggle against contenders, it’s looking unlikely that they will fall from the second slot, while they are also running out of time to overtake the Cleveland Cavaliers for the East’s number one overall seed. Wednesday’s loss put them 6.5 games behind them.
In fact, that win over New York may have left the Celtics feeling over-confident heading into Detroit. While the Celtics have struggled in comparison to last season, one couldn’t blame them for thinking that the Cavaliers were the only real barrier between them and a return to the NBA Finals. They probably were looking ahead to Friday’s home game against the team with the league’s best record.
In retrospect, that was a mistake. Heck, that might have been a mistake at the time, considering that even in that win against the third-place Knicks, they let New York claw its way back into the game. The 118-105 final score doesn’t tell the whole story, after all: it papers over the fact that the Knicks improbably made it a two-possession game during a wobbly second half.
The Celtics have been one of the league’s best teams for most of the Jaylen Brown/Jayson Tatum era, but have often been their own worst enemy. That’s acceptable, even inevitable, during the regular season: It’s impossible for a team to play as hard as possible for all 82 games. On Wednesday, the Celtics had the added excuse that they were playing the second night of a back-to-back following a win over the Toronto Raptors and without Brown, their most consistent player.
So, perhaps they thought they could conserve energy against the Pistons, a team they have owned in recent history. These, however, are not the 14-68 Pistons of last season. These red hot Pistons are a serious playoff contender that was riding a seven-game win streak before facing the Celtics.
Detroit has now increased that streak to eight games, it longest in 17 years. The team accomplished this even though Boston made 21 three-pointers in the 20-point loss. Previously, the Celtics were unbeaten when they were that successful at long-distance. The Pistons now have to feel like they have a chance against anybody.
Yet, this all might end up being good for Boston in the long run. It’s a mistake to think “MazzullaBall” simply revolves around taking a lot of threes and making them—although that’s obviously a key part of the equation—even the defending champions can’t win consistently unless they play a complete game.
Head coach Joe Mazzulla took pains to put the onus squarely on his own team after the loss. As quoted by the Boston Globe’s Gary Washburn, Mazzulla responded to a question on the Pistons’ Malik Beasley’s on-court celebrations with a blunt statement: “That’s on us for allowing him to feel that way. The only way to control that is to defend him better.”
That ultimately will be the key for Boston’s chances of repeating this year: the Celtics can’t always control whether their three-point shooting will be there—on occasion they will die by the three—but they can control the amount of defensive intensity they bring. More than anything else, that will determine how far they go in the rapidly approaching playoffs.
By now, the Celtics should have known they can’t overlook any opponent. If they had forgotten, the Pistons just issued them a painful reminder. Come the postseason, this will be especially true. Even in a relatively weak Eastern conference, any team good enough to survive the grind of the regular season will pose a genuine threat to the Celtics. Yes, even Detroit.
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