Celtics’ Ugly Loss To Cavaliers Isn’t Anything To Worry About… Yet
The Celtics have followed a few trends ever since Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown were handed the reigns to the franchise back in 2019.
Boston wins a ton of games. Brown and Tatum combine for a number of offensive explosions throughout the regular season. The C’s coast into the postseason, and despite losing games that should have no business even being close, they pull out series wins and find themselves with an opportunity to compete for a title.
It seems as though things are falling into place this season, with Thursday’s ugly loss to the Cleveland Cavaliers at TD Garden serving as one of those games the Celtics shouldn’t have even allowed to be close.
It isn’t time to panic, though.
The Cavaliers gave their best shot, and after weeks of seeing Darius Garland struggle to knock down shots around Donovan Mitchell, the duo exploded in the third quarter to hit 7-of-10 shots from beyond the arc. The C’s went 0-for-8.
In the immortal words of Eddie Palladino, that’s your ballgame.
Boston seems comfortable in knowing that it wasn’t going to win every game, with Tatum in particular summing up the loss with an explanation of how the team has bounced back from defeat throughout the season.
“The world thinks we’re never supposed to lose; we’re supposed to win every game by 25,” Tatum said, per Jay King of The Athletic. “It’s just not going to be like that all the time, so we don’t expect it to be easy… We’ve bounced back plenty of times. We lost what, 16 games this year? I’d like to think that we responded pretty well the few times that we did lose.”
The Celtics actually lost 18 times and didn’t really bounce back all that great as they dropped back-to-back games four times throughout the season. It’s another one of those trends we were talking about earlier.
We aren’t sounding the alarms, though, because it seems like the fix to this loss is the same one it was in a Game 2 loss to the Miami Heat last round. Boston just needs to shoot better, while limiting Mitchell’s impact as a playmaker. He can score all he wants, but keeping Cleveland in the game throughout the first half despite scoring just four points was the bigger story. He had more assists Thursday than any other game this postseason. It also won’t hurt if the Cavs regress back to who they actually are from three-point land, which is just fine.
The C’s need to show more urgency, though, which was reflected by Brown following the loss.
“I think just overall maybe we missed some shots and we let that translate,” Brown said, per King. “It’s the playoffs. That can’t happen. I don’t care if you’re missing shots, you’ve gotta guard the guy on the other end.”
It honestly shouldn’t be all that difficult for the Celtics to bounce back in Game 3. They’re better, they’ve already done something similar this postseason and in all honesty, they just had a bad night at the office Thursday.
It isn’t going to kill them, but if it continues further into this run, we might have a different story on our hands.