The Celtics are leaning back in the video game chair.
You probably felt a little like this if you watched the Boston Celtics’ 118-114 loss to the Philadelphia 76ers on Christmas.
Christmas Day with the Celtics pic.twitter.com/0myJXS7fKz
— Sam LaFrance (@SamLaFranceNBA) December 26, 2024
It was a day when Celtics fans experienced almost every emotion possible while watching their team battle it out; excitement, frustration, hope, defeat, and many more. The game was truly a rollercoaster.
But, why?
Aside from the fact that basketball is a game of runs, the wide range of emotions can be attributed to the Cs playing some of their absolute best and absolute worst basketball within the same 48 minutes — or as head coach Joe Mazzulla put it, “inconsistent basketball.”
“We just didn’t have great offensive rhythm and we didn’t have great defensive execution,” said Mazzulla. “Listen, we’re playing inconsistent basketball. So, we have to be better at both ends of the floor. We need to be more consistent on both ends of the floor.”
The inconsistency stems past this one game, but to Mazzulla’s point, Boston looked lost offensively to open the fourth quarter.
“That’s a fair criticism from him. We have to really dive into our work a little more and understand that we can’t relax during periods of the game,” said Al Horford, who should be exempt from all criticism after his vintage performance against Philly.
All of a sudden their two-point lead turned into a 15-point hole and it felt like every shot that they put up was a tough one, even if it was a makeable shot.
Is it unfathomable to think that Jayson Tatum, Derrick White, and Jaylen Brown would sink the above shots?
No, we’ve all seen them do it plenty of times. That doesn’t change that those are tough looks, even if it’s common for them to drop. Philadelphia did a great job of making Boston work for everything to open the final frame and it wound up being a big difference in this game.
It doesn’t help that the 76ers were creating wide-open looks on the other end on almost every possession.
They were loose, while the Celtics were playing tense.
“I think we played well the last six minutes of the fourth,” Tatum explained. “I think just that start of the fourth quarter, really, we struggled on both ends of the floor.”
JT wasn’t lying. The final six minutes of this game saw Boston play some of their best basketball of the year.
Once they were all-but pronounced dead with the third Caleb Martin (30% three-point shooter this year, by the way) three of the quarter, Boston essentially sat up in their chair and locked in, especially on the defensive end.
The engagement on defense was night and day from what we’d all watched for the first half of the quarter. Once they locked in, the Cs took away Philly’s open looks and turned them into contested mid-range jumpers and turnovers, and all of a sudden the big deficit was erased.
The real issue here is that the engagement is always under their control. Sure, you can’t control if someone like Caleb Martin all of a sudden is a sharpshooter, but you can always control your own focus.
“Yeah, I think we’ve got to take some ownership,” Tatum continued. “We’ve got to be better. We’ve got to acknowledge the things that we’ve done, not that, you know, not so great. We got to look in the mirror and man up. And we just got to be better. We fully believe in ourselves, you know, the things that we can do when we’re fully locked in, and we’ve done it time and time again.”
Tatum’s right. The Celtics have earned a mulligan or two from the community. An NBA Championship will do that. At the same time, they’ve now lost three of their last four games, and four of their last seven. Boston is 6-5 in December after losing to the 76ers — inconsistent, if you will.