The Boston Celtics are done for the season, sent into a summer of uncertainty on the wings of an ignominious Game 6 defeat in New York.
The team that spent most of the year as the Vegas favorite to repeat as NBA champion didn’t make it past the second round. The team with all the answers was rendered dumbfounded even before Jayson Tatum lay on the Madison Square Garden floor, and, really, who could have seen this coming.
Actually, we did. Four months ago.
The Celtics, after a warm start, had slipped into snooze control at the turn of the calendar year. By mid-January they were in a 7-7 funk of sorts, made worse by their indifferent response to challenges. A loss to the “get me to the lottery on time” Raptors raised the height of eyebrows another millimeter.
This is what I wrote in a Heavy Sports story published January 17th:
With half the regular season remaining and, thus, ample time to steer out of this skid, there remains just one non-health danger: that the bad reactions to bad possessions become habit. That when they reach for their crisp offense and ultra-connected defense in the playoffs, the gig speed will be slower than necessary.
And there it was on full display while kissing away 20-point leads in the first two games against the Knicks — in Boston, no less. The Celtics regained their footing in Game 3, but then blew a 14-point advantage two nights later. Down 3-1, the series was all over but the shouting from Celebrity Row at MSG. (Fun fact: Timothee Chalamet was negative-22 years old the last time the Knicks won an NBA championship.)
In all the losing cases, the cause of doom was the same: The Celts had built their leads through ball movement, cutting and defense, but when New York gathered a modicum of momentum, they slipped back into iso-ball or simply tightened up while missing open shots, many of them rushed.
Tatum was utterly brilliant in Game 4 on the way to 42 points in 40 minutes, but as the rest of Celtics bore witness, their defense disintegrated, enabling the Knicks to a 70-point second half.
The Warning Signs Were There for the Celtics
Look, the Celts may have been toast without Tatum in the conference finals against Indiana. May have been. But they believed they should have been there. The reality is that the Knicks punched them in the face, and, with the exception of Game 5 in Boston, the C’s didn’t hit back nearly hard enough.
But the lack of urgency and fight had its roots much earlier. The warning signs were there.
Said one veteran NBA scout in that January 17 piece, “It can be hard to watch a team that good make those kind of mistakes. I mean, it gives all the rest of us hope, but when you see one guy fall asleep on defense and not close out to a shooter, that’s just bad basketball. You’ll see one of their guys stop to complain about a call and not get back on defense.
“That’s just such a good team, with good people and all that, too. When you see them lose their focus and make the mistakes that bad teams make, it almost seems… surreal.”
‘We Just Can’t Keep Cruising & Expect to Just Turn It Up Towards the End’
Kristaps Porzingis reached for the alarm that night in Toronto.
“We’re in a bad moment right now, for sure,” he said. “We have to be realistic, like look in the mirror. We’re not playing the best basketball. We’re not executing. We’re not doing this, this, this. … We have to be honest with ourselves; otherwise we’ll keep going like this.
“We just can’t keep cruising and expect to just turn it up towards the end. It’s in our hands.”
And then it was out of their hands. While Joe Mazzulla spoke with legitimate perspective on the process during the season, his players couldn’t consistently hold their focus. When times got tight, they got tighter.
Their bravado reduced to rubble by the squandering of big leads, the Celtics are the fallen statue of Egyptian pharaoh Ozymandias lying late Friday in the Manhattan desert. “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair,” wrote the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.
“Now you don’t seem so proud,” wrote the poet Bob Dylan.
“But I know it’s my own damn fault,” wrote the poet Jimmy Buffett.
