BOSTON — While the outside world focused solely on the Celtics’ late-game failures in Game 2, Joe Mazzulla pointed to another inflection point in his team’s stunning collapse.
With three minutes left in the first half, a Derrick White 3-pointer gave his team a 46-30 lead. On a 9-0 spurt, the Celtics had a chance to tuck the New York Knicks into bed. Looking to continue his team’s run, White applied full-court pressure to Josh Hart. The TD Garden crowd was already on its feet. Another stop and score would have driven the fans into a state of delirium.
Instead, with New York already in the bonus, White fouled Hart before he reached the half-court line. He sank both of the free throws and the Celtics missed their next three shots. Barely more than a minute after White’s foul, the Knicks cut the margin to a manageable 10 points. By halftime, they were within nine.
“I think any time you blow two 20-point leads you can always go to a bunch of things as to why that happens within a game,” Mazzulla said. “I think there are so many factors that go into it and each game was different. I thought in (Game 2), you start the second quarter, to me you can even take it a step further. To me, the bonus foul we had when it was 46-30 is just as impactful as getting it from 16 (points) to nine ending the first half. But then again, we got it to 20 (later) but just those types of plays are what give teams life, whether it’s malicious from the standpoint of, you know, did we have good intentions and not execute or did we have poor intentions. And I think more along the lines of Game 2 we had good intentions, we just didn’t execute.”
As talented as the Celtics are, they pride themselves on being more intelligent than their opponents. They go to great lengths to work on all of the situational plays that often decide games. Even after wins, Mazzulla sometimes seems to focus more on the little details that could have cost his team. After beating Miami handily in February, he expressed frustration about the way Boston ended the second quarter of that game. Mazzulla said he believes the details of closing out quarters make the biggest difference between winning and losing.
In both games of this series so far, the Celtics have opened the door ever so slightly after taking big leads. Game 2 could have been Game 1’s twin. With a 20-point advantage late in the third quarter, Jayson Tatum stripped OG Anunoby and the Celtics took off on a fast break. Tatum fed a bounce pass to Jaylen Brown, who was running the lane alongside him. Brown just didn’t catch it. The ball went off his hands and out of bounds. An easy basket, which would have pushed Boston’s lead to 22 points, morphed into a turnover.
Over the next two minutes, the Celtics missed two wide-open 3-pointers and a point-blank putback attempt. They barely bothered Deuce McBride as he burst past them for an easy dunk.
They left Hart wide open in the corner.
They lost McBride again in transition, this time for an unguarded 3-pointer.
Over the final three minutes of the third quarter, the Celtics committed four turnovers, including two live-ball turnovers that gave the Knicks numbers in the other direction. The carelessness on both ends of the court flipped the game.
“You go up 20 and we have a transition turnover, we have a tip dunk that we don’t get and then we miss two open looks,” Mazzulla said. “So we just have to be better at executing in those situations when we’re in that moment and having an understanding that we’re playing against a great team and they’re obviously going to make their runs. We need to manage those with proper execution, proper situational defense throughout the entire game.”
The Celtics are a couple of plays away from leading this series 2-0. Instead, they’re on the wrong side of that series score in what has been a historic start to the second round for all the wrong reasons. They became the first team to blow two 20-point leads in the same postseason — and they did that in back-to-back games at home. Before this season, no 60-win team had ever dropped the first two games of the second round. After the Cavaliers accomplished that feat on Tuesday, the Celtics joined them in the exclusive club one day later.
They did so despite watching Cleveland’s Game 2 meltdown to learn from it as a team. Mazzulla often has his team watch in-game situations around the league, and there was plenty to draw from the way the Cavaliers handled the end of that shocker. In less than a minute, Cleveland lost a seven-point lead, one small detail at a time. Two Cavaliers turnovers and a pair of missed free throw box outs allowed Tyrese Haliburton to sink a game-winning 3-pointer with one second left. Instead of tying the series at 1-1, Cleveland fell into a 2-0 deficit with the next two games on the road.
The Celtics studied the basketball minutiae of the situation, but also saw a reminder of what could happen to them if they let up at any point in Game 2.
“Especially after watching the Pacers-Cleveland game, it’s a full 48-minute fight tonight,” Payton Pritchard said before Game 2. “We let off the throttle last game up 20 (points) so we let that one slip. So we can’t let stuff like that happen.”
It happened again. The sequel. A Tatum turnover in the final seconds cemented the Celtics’ second straight painful finish. He said he made the wrong read on that final play by driving the ball into a crowded area. Beyond that one mistake, he said he “can’t sugarcoat anything” about his significant struggles throughout the series.
“I need to be better,” Tatum said. “I expect to be a lot better.”
The Celtics all need to sharpen up. Over the two games so far, they have shot 35.6 percent from the field combined — that’s worse than their lowest field goal percentage in any game before that. With their 3-point shooting at 25 percent for the series, they know that everything would be different if they had just hit a few of the open shots they usually drain. Still, in a short series, they also understand they can’t necessarily count on their shots to fall moving forward. They need to take care of every variable they can, so it doesn’t matter if they keep missing from outside.
Mazzulla said they needed to be honest with themselves about their current predicament.
“I think there’s actually a sense of you could be very prideful in thinking of like, ‘Oh, who are we that we’re not allowed to be down 0-2?’” Mazzulla said. “And so I think you have to eliminate that pride and have an understanding of, this is the way that it is. At the same time, people don’t become who they say they want to become unless they transition these moments into greater moments. And that may not be this year, it could be just in life itself, but you can’t just have a pride and entitlement that we’re holier than thou, that we’re not allowed to be down 0-2. This is the situation that we’re in, so we have to have an understanding of why we’re in it and we got to fix it. And we have an opportunity to fix that. So yeah, I do relish that because these moments are all forgotten if you transition them into taking advantage of the opportunity that you have.”
(Photo: Maddie Meyer / Getty Images)