The Celtics are out of answers, so how do they move on from here?
"Everybody wants to be pessimistic, to pick everything apart. It doesn't help."
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COMMENTARY
After their loss to the Dallas Mavericks on Wednesday, Boston Celtics players and coaches who spoke to the media said the words “I don’t know” a total of 12 times.
“Maybe I have to shuffle stuff. I don’t know. I don’t know,” Brad Stevens said. “But it’s a team I’m coaching, so it should all fall on me.”
“I don’t know what you guys want me to say, to be honest,” Jaylen Brown said. “I think everything has a factor that’s involved. I don’t know. I don’t know what you guys want me to say.”
The Celtics are trying, but they are out of answers. As Danny Ainge noted in his weekly interview with Toucher & Rich on Thursday, a different player seems to struggle every game. The Celtics have a costly 10-12 minute stretch on a near-nightly basis, but that stretch could occur at any time. The defense — a hallmark of teams coached by Brad Stevens — is 17th in the NBA, which is its lowest ranking since Stevens’ first year in Boston.
“I don’t know,” Marcus Smart said, when asked about the defense. “Trust me, if I knew, we wouldn’t be here talking about it.”
The team’s post-game comments highlight their recent frustrations.
“We’re trying,” Smart said on Wednesday. “Like I said before, we feel it, we hear it, we’re out there giving it everything we’ve got. It might not look like it from looking in, but we are. We’re fighting a lot of people. It’s us versus everybody. So it gets heavy. You’ve just got to continue to keep it going.”
Perhaps most telling: The Celtics can’t even seem to pinpoint the root cause of their issues. Neither can Danny Ainge or Brad Stevens. At this stage, despite the obvious talent on the roster, the Celtics appear to be sliding toward a low playoff seed at best, and perhaps something even lower.
The Celtics play 16 games in April, 11 of which are against playoff teams (and one of the non-playoff teams is the Golden State Warriors with Steph Curry back in the lineup). Starting on Sunday, they play eight games in 14 days. When they finally get two days off in a row on April 20 and 21, their next two opponents are the Phoenix Suns and Brooklyn Nets. The road ahead only gets harder.
A lot of Celtics hand-wringing has (and will continue to) occur, and all of it is warranted. They have disappointed enormously, and the ripple effects could be significant. The situation could become untenable for key members of the roster. Stars might need a fresh start. All of the mitigating circumstances in the world — which are not the same as excuses — can be true, and yet the NBA is a zero-sum game. Wins are always encouraging, losses are the inverse, and the Celtics to this point have piled up more of the latter. Acknowledging all of the difficult questions about this team is important.
Doing so, however, begs a different kind of difficult question: What if the expectations need to be drastically lowered? If the Celtics somehow surged and earned the fourth seed, would anyone believe they are contenders? And if they aren’t contenders, what’s the point of continually pillorying a borderline playoff team for not being a contender?
“Everybody wants to be pessimistic, to pick everything apart,” Jaylen Brown said. “It doesn’t help.”
He’s right. At this stage, cajoling players for their on-and-off effort won’t make a difference. There’s a lot of talent on this roster, but the 48-game sample size so far has shown that expecting it to jell is expecting quite a bit.
There are huge, existential questions that Danny Ainge and the franchise will need to address in the offseason. If this continues, the Celtics might need a major overhaul just to clear the air. This situation feels untenable.
But looking at the 2020-21 team through the lens of a borderline playoff team — rather than through the lens of a team expected to compete with the Brooklyn Nets — might be a good place to start for everyone involved. Fans who desperately need an escape might be able to take some joy in the wins and maybe a little less frustration from the losses. Players and coaches could take a breath. Interactions between players and media might be a little less fraught.
Celtics players and coaches should be held accountable. But expecting them to become something over the next few weeks that they demonstrably can’t become is setting them up for further disappointment and will only bring everything to a boiling point quicker.
Like so many of us these days, the Celtics are trying. They feel it. It gets heavy. They have 24 games remaining to try to fix their season, but it might be time to accept — really accept — that they might not be able to pull it off and that the time to evaluate what comes next is quickly approaching.
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