BOSTON — Great teams are born of a distinct identity. It might not be unique, but its contours reflect the makeup of the locker room and the organization’s vision.
For the past two years, the Boston Celtics defined the direction of the NBA with their endless versatility and unrelenting desire to shoot the 3. It didn’t always work, but it worked enough in the aggregate for the Celtics to win a championship and then enter the playoffs positioned to potentially do it again.
It’s not working right now. It doesn’t mean their theory is faulty. The Celtics are facing an identity crisis, but it’s one they can resolve quite easily. If their shots go down, they’re the defending champs again, a team that has an answer for every question posed its way.
Watching the Celtics now, they look like they stayed up all night preparing for an exam and could only remember the first few bullet points from their study guide. The Celtics lost to the New York Knicks 91-90 on Wednesday, falling into an 0-2 hole as the series moves to New York, a shocking moment for the defending champions, who didn’t lose two games in a series last season.
Both teams struggled to score, and the difference between winner and loser in this series has been perilously close, but the Celtics simply look off.
This was like watching the Houston Rockets from Game 7 of the 2018 Western Conference finals play the Houston Rockets from Game 7 of the 2018 Western Conference finals. If anyone hit a 3, it was a miracle. The Knicks were able to adapt better than the Celtics, and another Mikal Bridges walk-off steal won it for New York.
The Knicks beat the Detroit Pistons in the first round by coming back again and again. It seemed obvious a week ago that those opportunities wouldn’t come against a Celtics team with far more talent and experience. Somehow, the Knicks keep defying logic.
At the end of regulation in Game 1, Tatum couldn’t get past Mitchell Robinson because OG Anunoby and Bridges were waiting in the wings, missing a stepback 3 that led to overtime. This time, he tried to attack and was reminded why he resisted 48 hours earlier.
Tatum threw it away in a possession inexplicably devoid of coherent execution for such a big moment, then was bailed out by the fire alarm, as the media horde had to evacuate before he stepped to the podium. When they returned, he was gone, along with the last chance for a thorough explanation of this continuous collapse.
The narrative the Knicks brought in Anunoby and Bridges to match up with Tatum and Brown looked farcical during the regular season. The Knicks hoped their defense would be built for the postseason instead, with the chances of a Celtics matchup looking likely when the Cleveland Cavaliers made it clear early in the season they would chase down the one seed. It’s all proving true.
Boston’s strategic approach was supposed to mitigate this. If Tatum can’t get to his looks, he could at least create them for others. The Celtics are doing that and shooting terribly, following up a 25 percent 3-point shooting performance in Game 1 with a 25 percent performance in Game 2. Even when their 3-point volume returned to Earth’s atmosphere, the temperature remained frigid.
Jalen Brunson is still taking over fourth quarters, whereas Brown and Tatum have just two field goals apiece in the fourth for the series. When Tatum and Brown clanked genuinely wide-open 3s in crunchtime, it became strange.
It looked like something was holistically wrong with the team. Brown said after Boston’s Game 1 loss that the team was too reliant on 3-pointers when it attempted and missed an NBA playoffs record amount.
When Brown is the one Celtic willing to speak out about the game plan — often on this particular point about playing too passive shooting the ball — he tends to get his way the next game. Maybe it’s because he picks the right moment to call things out; perhaps it’s just the natural swing of the strategic pendulum.
His message after another bewildering loss was that what’s done is done. You don’t have to be perceptive to see the team is failing. It’s obvious, and Brown wasn’t hiding from it.
“Two games we were up 20 points, and somehow we come out not with wins. It’s inexcusable,” he said. “But we’re going to learn from it. We’re going to respond.”
The NBA’s playoff 3-point average entering Wednesday was 35 percent, down from 37 percent in the regular season, according to former Washington Wizards coach Dean Oliver. Watch any game around the league and the scoring is far below what we’re used to seeing in the regular season and miles from where things were last season.
Teams have gotten more attuned to scouting poor shooters to leave unguarded, which usually pays off. But Josh Hart burned the Celtics on that strategy in Game 2, scoring a game-high 23 points as the Celtics watched him bury shots from afar.
“We need some urgency, even if the 3-ball isn’t falling up to our level,” Kristaps Porziņģis said. “We need urgency in other areas, and we can still do it.”
Maybe the pressure is alleviated for a locker room focused on winning the next game. But look at the grand scheme of things to find a historically expensive roster in a league in which every repeat champion has had multiple Hall of Famers. Does this team have multiple Hall of Famers?
Porziņģis acknowledged that the illness that kept him out for the second half of Game 1 and rendered him a shell of himself in Game 2 is likely connected to the one that kept him out for eight games in March, something Joe Mazzulla revealed at practice Tuesday. He described it as a “big crash now” and that his energy “hasn’t been good.”
“I’m not feeling my best at all. But it just kills me inside that it’s happening in this moment, and what I’m super appreciative about is (the) support,” Porziņģis said. “It’s not no injury or nothing, but I’m just not feeling my best. And it’s tough for me, honestly. But who cares? Nobody feels sorry for us, sorry for me, and we have to keep going.”
Of the 28 teams that have dropped the first two games at home in a seven-game series, only four have come back to win. Porziņģis has not been able to do any of the things that gave the Celtics endless versatility in the past, and the Knicks might match up too well against them to win without the 7-foot-3 center taking control. But the Celtics aren’t too far from turning things around.
They have lost both of these games by a single shot, which Bridges didn’t even let them get off. It’s an embarrassment, and one they can’t hide from, even if this series is closer than it appears. They can live with that. But their core identity letting them down once again while their stars struggle, that’s something that can’t be easily fixed.
“It should sting. Let it sting. Let it sting for the night,” Brown said. “Then, tomorrow’s a new day. We move forward.”
(Photo of Jayson Tatum and OG Anunoby: Maddie Meyer / Getty Images)
