BOSTON — The Celtics had the ball up by three points with 21 seconds left when Jayson Tatum tossed a full court pass to Jrue Holiday underneath the rim. Holiday ran to the perimeter to kill clock and threw the ball out-of-bounds. The teams traded take fouls that gained the Hawks a point, so Atlanta trailed by two points when Holiday fouled Young in the bonus as he crossed half court. A rare massive mistake from the two-time champ.
Boston, in nearly the same manner as six days earlier, capsized in crunch time. This time they lost, 119-115, afforded five extra minutes in overtime.
“I think we had the game won. I gotta make some better plays,” Holiday said after. “Make a better pass to J.B. or maybe if I hold on to the ball and get free throws, it’s a different situation. I don’t foul Trae, we’re still up two. This game is on me. Execution on my part has to be better.”
Holiday said team issues are always easy to address after. You see it, you address it, you fix it. That didn’t happen following the New Orleans game, when Tatum missed a pair of free throws and Derrick White committed a five-second violation that allowed CJ McCollum to take an unsuccessful game-winning floater. The Celtics escaped, and Joe Mazzulla leaned into crediting the team’s mistakes with effort. They watched film and broke down the near disaster as a team, then three days later didn’t show up at Toronto. They haven’t fixed it.
Only an exposed Magic team missing two of their best players and multiple key depth contributors allowed Boston to skate by on its way to 8-8 over the last 16 games. Mazzulla returned to the podium the following night with mixed messages, saying he’s more excited than he began the year, but clarifying that he’s not an optimistic person. He admitted the loss was bad while saying they can’t dwell on them. There isn’t time for that, he said, before catching himself and noting they had a six-hour flight ahead.
On Holiday, Mazzulla said he didn’t believe Holiday fouled Young intentionally and wouldn’t offer a defined strategy on what he should’ve done when he caught the ball beneath the rim wide open before his turnover. They practiced that and when he tried to score against Memphis in a similar situation in 2023, the Grizzlies blocked him and gained a chance to win the game the other way, though that shot came in a far more contested situation.
“If we’re going to be on a journey for however long that is, two years, whatever the case may be, this is what you sign up for,” Mazzulla said. “This is the most fun part that you have to have. As long as we’re in it, that’s how we’re gonna attack it. So … there’s zero fear whatsoever. If anything, there’s excitement. This is the journey, so sign me up for this.”
It’s hard to blame Mazzulla entirely for the team’s demeanor after he grew more aggressive in recent games in combating the team’s lacking effort and execution. He called timeouts more quickly than usual, briefly benched Jayson Tatum on Saturday following a technical foul and joined him on the floor later, clapping as he and Onyeka Okongwu battled for a loose ball and caused a tussle in a legitimately great moment. Turning to sit down on the bench after one Hawks basket, Mazzulla showed frustration and combated the notion the day before that he doesn’t use his voice despite typically staying away from publicly criticizing his players.
That’s a weakness right now, and while Mazzulla’s tactically equipped to handle this lull, it’s unclear how he’ll solve increasingly consistent inconsistency like Wednesday at Toronto, late game mistakes from Sunday and Saturday, and a starting lineup that can’t generate or stop threes. Porziņģis and Al Horford sat out Saturday’s back-to-back due to the team using both on Friday in a curious move. Porziņģis had indicated he believed he could play the day before, but that it was out of his hands.
As Boston’s shooting dips, they’re taking less threes, their superpower and bread-and-butter style disappearing as they’ve struggled immensely to rely on defense to get them through droughts. They’ve gone the other way on that end.
“I wonder that too. I’m like man, we gotta get those (threes) up,” Al Horford said. “We had those numbers way up earlier in the season, and now it seems like we’re taking less. I like when we shoot a lot of threes. That’s a really good question. We have a lot of good shooters. When we shoot more, we have better chances. Also, it spreads the floor out, opens the floor up a lot for Jaylen and Jayson. I’m sure that we’ll get back there eventually. I can’t really tell you right now what it is.”
Jaylen Brown took nine threes in another slow shooting performance after only attempting two or fewer in four of his last five games. He’s shooting 39.2% from the field this month after dealing with a right shoulder ailment. Tatum developed one in his left shoulder late last week, but played through it on Saturday as he and Brown combined to shoot 16-for-48 in the loss. Mazzulla staggered their first quarter minutes this time, a new approach as Tatum’s full first quarter efforts have aided him and Brown’s expressed several times that sitting down early in opening frames has been an adjustment. Brown hasn’t spoken to the media since Boston’s loss to the Kings over one week ago.
Holiday, Horford, Tatum and White have, mostly shaking off their extended recent struggles as different issues each night. It’s difficult to disagree with that. Boston played harder on Saturday than they did on Wednesday. Brown, following a bizarrely unenthusiastic performance on Wednesday, at least played harder on Friday and Saturday, and even stayed in the game after a head-first tumble into the parquet late in the game. He and Tatum connected on a game-tying three in the fourth, but mostly resorted to taking turns atop the offense recently. Only Kristaps Porziņģis sounded an alarm on the team’s play on Wednesday. Others have defended it.
“I wouldn’t say it went back the other way,” White said after the Hawks loss. “There are a lot of times we had a lot of great looks and it just didn’t go in. There are obviously a couple things down the stretch there that we want to do differently, but we just gotta stick with it. Nobody’s feeling sorry for us and we gotta just keep going. I mean, nobody in here is used to losing or wants to lose, so there’s definitely frustration. We just gotta stick together and everybody believes in one another, everybody’s done a lot of great things with this team … just keep going.”
The Celtics built a 12-point edge through the first quarter behind Brown’s passing, scoring and defense, Luke Kornet’s cuts and deflections, and forcing four turnovers in the first four minutes. Then, the slippage began, Brown throwing away a pass, Sam Hauser missing three triples that could’ve pushed the lead to 17 points and three fouls. Mazzulla and Horford coached Neemias Queta up into the second timeout before later playing him the entirety of overtime after he only played rotation minutes once since Jan. 3, the night before. It didn’t work.
While Boston forced 10 first half turnovers that should’ve handed them a comfortable double-digit lead, Hauser tossed an alley-oop over Tatum’s head. Tatum missed a layup in traffic and drew a technical, leading him to the bench minutes into the second quarter. The Celtics’ offense spiraled from that point on, scoring nine points in the first nine minutes of the second while the Hawks climbed into a lead on a 23-9 run, pushing Atlanta into halftime up 52-48 with a 31-15 second quarter win.
“The low-hanging fruit is to focus on those last few plays,” Mazzulla said. “Which are important, you have to execute those and we didn’t, but there are still plenty of plays throughout that we could get better at.”
That advantage extended to seven with a pair of Jalen Johnson dunks ahead of Boston’s defense to start the third. Tatum started the frame with a pair of makes, then missed two threes and turned it over dribbling out-of-bounds. White, Payton Pritchard and Tatum shot the Celtics into a lead later in the quarter, both teams going cold and the Hawks on their way to 17 turnovers, but with a chance to put Boston ahead by eight points after one of Young’s giveaways, Hauser ran ahead of everyone and popped a two-handed dunk off the back of the rim to fall to 0-for-6.
The challenges continued into the fourth, even with a 78-73 cushion. Johnson and Okongwu put back misses, Vit Krejčí stepped into an uncontested corner three to slash Boston’s advantage to 87-84. Garrison Mathews did the same on the next possession and missed, but Clint Capela grabbed the board and pulled Atlanta within one point.
The Celtics’ defenders stood and watched.
The most concerning aspect of Boston’s struggles continues to come on the defensive end. Hunter attacked Kornet to draw close late, Trae Young stepped around screens mostly uncontested late in the fourth into overtime and a bad rotation in the extra frame allowed Okongwu to score the go-ahead three point play inside alongside a lockdown effort on Brown to secure the win. Then, Okongwu iced the game with an offensive rebound when Johnson missed two game-sealing free throws. The Hawks finished 62.5% on twos.
Mazzulla grew more stern later in his press conference after joking about how demoralized the media sounded, and explained his own demeanor before the team headed west.
“The expectations come from the film sessions, the pressure we put on ourselves to make sure that we execute. By no means are we running from the expectation of we’re here to win, we have to win and that’s the way that it is,” he said. “You just have to continue to move forward. I always go back to the expectation … from the standpoint of do we think it’s always going to go the way we think? I care more about how we respond by the way we prepare, by the way we communicate together as a team and by the way we play. That’s the most important thing, but by no means, I can’t stress that enough, there’s an expectation to win, we’re not doing it, it’s not good enough, we have to be better. Don’t think we’re running from that.”
