The Boston Celtics are by no means in any trouble. They lost Monday night at home to the ascending Houston Rockets, and yes, the Celtics are now more than five games back of the Cleveland Cavaliers at the top of the Eastern Conference; also yes, they've been playing approximately .500 ball since the middle of December. Yes, too, fine: The New York Knicks are breathing Midtown hot dog breath down their necks. Still: The Celtics are in no real danger of sliding out of contention. They've had some bad luck in the clutch, going 11–10 over a stretch of games where they've posted the fourth best net rating in the league. This is a tough part of their schedule, they're not entirely healthy, and a competent team can only slide so far in the soft East. They'll be fine.
If you imagined Joe Mazzulla's perfected ActuariBall made the Celtics immune from hard times—and whether that thought filled you with comfort or dread—I suppose this recent slump has disabused you of the notion. It is precisely on the side of the ball where they lean furthest into math mode that they are presently struggling: Per Cleaning The Glass, over the last two weeks Boston's offense, which on the season scores the third-most points per possession in the NBA, has dropped to 16th in efficiency, just above the ridiculous Charlotte Hornets and just below the somehow even more ridiculous Philadelphia 76ers. They've been hucking just as many threes as ever, but where the Celtics were above average by proficiency across the first two months of the season, since their unexpected home loss to the Chicago Bulls on Dec. 19 they have fallen to eighth-worst. It's not entirely that simple, but also, the Celtics are to a certain extent dying by the sword. Mazzulla's offense seeks to remove some of the variance of distance shooting by maximizing volume, but it is still, by God, a make-or-miss league. Monday night it was the dreaded Dillon Brooks doing the making, to the deep and audible exasperation of the Boston faithful:
It's when Boston's own threes aren't falling that certain other minor-seeming deficits start to pop. In the second half of Monday's loss, the Rockets started to throw traps at Boston's main guys, mostly Jayson Tatum but also sometimes Jaylen Brown. There was a pretty hilarious sequence where the screener was often injury-sub Luke Kornet and his defender was usually Steven Adams, and when I tell you that this did not initially work for the Rockets, brother, I want you to imagine Steven Adams as a literal ghost. Go ahead and make him transparent, in your mind, and even drape a huge California king-sized bed sheet over his head. Tatum and Brown would throw one good dribble move at the poor lumbering Kiwi and Houston's entire defense would fly apart like a faberge egg blasted with a howitzer. For a few delirious minutes, Luke damn Kornet was dominating the basketball game, just by moving into the huge pockets of space created by these insanely ineffective traps.
There was about a five-minute period spanning the end of the third quarter where the Rockets went cold, Kornet and Payton Pritchard threw in some important buckets, momentum swung very heavily in Boston's favor, and it looked like the pesky road team might finally go away. Ime Udoka, who once coached Tatum and Brown, stuck to the plan, but jiggered the personnel. Once the Rockets were able to throw two reasonably mobile defenders at Boston's shot-creators, it was really sort of galling to see how quickly and completely the Celtics lost the ability to generate good offense. This is particularly noteworthy, because another tentpole of Mazzulla's offense is putting two on the ball. This man loves to put two on the ball! What kind of maniac counterpart puts two on the ball on purpose against the team of Mr. Put Two On The Ball, himself? Is this not like walking up to the cat burglar who is actively prying away at the hinges of your hotel safe and simply handing him a fistful of jewels?
Udoka would say, I'm sure, that there's a difference between a help defender who is forced to scramble toward the ball due to careful offensive execution or a positional mismatch and one who leaps out onto the ball-handler proactively, shooing him away from the basket and forcing the offense to do the scrambling. Mazzulla, for that matter, would certainly agree. Teams do this against Luka Doncic or Anthony Edwards, but a cool-headed operator with any sort of knack for passing will find short-rollers and make skip passes and in general find ways to punish a self-contorting defense.
Against Houston's improved defensive execution, Boston bumbled and panicked their way to a stretch of just five points on 10 possessions, surrendered the only real breathing room they'd had all night, and entered the final stages of the game out of rhythm and without having established anything resembling a method for convincing the Rockets to please, for the love of God, put just one on the ball. It became impossible to ignore that Tatum and Brown really do not possess the vision and passing acumen of a few of the game's best alpha-scorer types. Boston doesn't generally require that of them, because the team is so well-oiled in its usual actions, but it was startling to see what a sharp and supremely athletic opponent could do to the Celtics by forcing Tatum and Brown to make quick decisions against pressure. Future playoff opponents will have noticed.
Mazzulla is a stay-the-course kind of guy, which accounts perhaps for his decision to continue giving Amen Thompson the Ben Simmons treatment Monday night even while the second-year wing was repeatedly crane-kicking Boston's defense directly in the tender groin meat. Boston television analyst Brian Scalabrine noted that lately it seems like every game, some opposing role-player puts up a career night on the Celtics. This, too, is part of the Mazzulla playbook: Over 82 games, more often than not you are going to win if you force your opponents to ride the production of options three through five. Averages are due to come back around for the Celtics this regular season, the way on-base percentage came back around for the Moneyball Athletics. The Celtics want to win a game, yes, but more than that they want to win 60 percent of their games, and that means sticking to the plan.
It's funny to preach patience in the general direction of Celtics fans. Brooks flopped into a charge call in the second half Monday night and did an objectively unpleasant little shimmy while flat on his back, and despite thinking of myself as a good and moral person I found myself enjoying the sight, and the whiny umbrage of a very noisy Boston fan seated near the courtside broadcast table. Celtics fans can afford to eat it for a while, for other reasons too but mainly because health and regression will have says in all of this before anything of real consequence is ever decided. It's a long regular season; the Celtics, perhaps more than any other outfit in the sport, are built for it.
