Celtics fall apart late, blow 22-point lead to Cavaliers to snap winning streak: 9 takeaways
Dean Wade scored 20 points in the fourth quarter, outscoring the Celtics by himself.
The Celtics fell apart down the stretch and snapped their 11-game winning streak with a 105-104 loss to the Cavaliers on Tuesday.
Here are the takeaways.
1. A number of talking points about execution will emerge from the loss, so let’s handle those at the top.
With time winding down, Jayson Tatum tried to attack Darius Garland in isolation – a decent plan in theory, but one that didn’t produce a particularly good shot. The officials called a foul on Tatum’s fall-away jumper, but they overturned it after J.B. Bickerstaff challenged it. Replays appeared to show that Tatum did indeed kick his leg out to initiate the contact with Garland. Replays also showed Kristaps Porzingis grabbing an uncontested rebound and shoveling it back in, but he almost certainly would have been late anyway – the clock stopped at 0.7 seconds with the ball still bouncing around on the rim, and Porzingis didn’t grab it until later.
“We’ve got to go faster there,” Joe Mazzulla told reporters afterward.
They certainly do, and it’s a shame for the Celtics that as their impressive 11-game winning streak comes to an end, the oldest questions about this team start to emerge again after pummeling opponents for weeks.
Those questions are fair to an extent. The Celtics went 0-for-8 in the fourth quarter, and that doomed them, which is one criticism of their crunch-time offense. The struggles looked very familiar.
But the Celtics still have a monstrous net rating (+11.3 per Cleaning the Glass, best in the NBA by 3.3). They have proven repeatedly to be a much better team than last year’s shakier group, even if last year’s tendencies occasionally re-emerge. It’s not logically inconsistent to say that a much better version of last year’s Eastern Conference finalist – with some familiar flaws, but a lot of improvements – is the favorite entering the playoffs. The Celtics aren’t invincible, but they are really good.
It’s probably also worth remembering that the Cavaliers got unreasonably hot in the final quarter, but that might not be particularly comforting for Celtics fans who got flashbacks thinking about Gabe Vincent and Caleb Martin as they watched Dean Wade rain in 3-pointers.
2. For what it’s worth, the referees got the final call right as well, despite some confusion on the Celtics’ broadcast. The clock started as soon as Porzingis tipped the ball to Derrick White, and the Celtics tried to call timeout immediately. Zach Zarba ruled that time had expired before the Celtics could call timeout.
According to the NBA’s official rule book, “the shot clock shall start when new possession is obtained.” However, the game clock starts as soon as the ball is touched on a jump ball, and that’s what happened on the final play.
3. Officials did, however, hurt the Celtics in the closing seconds by not recognizing Joe Mazzulla as he tried to call timeout with just under five seconds remaining. That would have given them a chance to set up something a little better than what Tatum cobbled together.
4. The Cavaliers deserve a lot of credit for winning that game under deeply unfavorable circumstances. Donovan Mitchell remains out as he deals with a tendinitis-like issue in his knee. Max Strus was out with a knee strain. Evan Mobley left the game in the third quarter with a nasty looking sprained ankle after an odd landing.
And yet, the Cavaliers managed to battle back from a 22-point fourth-quarter deficit against the NBA’s best team. It may not have been particularly repeatable – again, Dean Wade scored 20 fourth-quarter points and went 7-for-7 from the field and 5-for-5 from 3-point range, which is an otherworldly heater.
At least, we think it’s not repeatable. But we’ve been wrong before.
5. Before the game fell apart and derailed the narrative, Derrick White swatted four shots. White is currently averaging 1.2 blocks per game, which would make him 10th all-time in blocks per game by a guard.
6. Tatum and Brown both shot 8-for-20 from the field, and both players hit a better percentage from 3-point range (55.6 percent and 42.9 percent respectively) than they did inside the arc.
7. As they tend to do, the Celtics didn’t downplay the loss, but they did suggest that going through struggles can be a good thing.
Porzingis called the loss “healthy.”
“We do have a feeling that we were pretty much going to win every game, we’re invincible, we’re going to win this game no matter what happens, we’re like ‘Ah we’ve got this,’” he told reporters. “A little bit of that feeling is always there. It’s maybe healthy, but it’s also healthy to get a loss here and there to kind of like, ‘All right, here we go, let’s recalibrate a little bit, and have that attention to detail again.’ So I think it’s completely fine, and I think it’s necessary for us to keep building.”
8. The Cavaliers welcomed one of the most famous athletes in the world on Tuesday, further cementing it as a marquee game: Joey Chestnut was present, and he managed to stuff down 39 perogies in two minutes.
In lesser-known athlete news, Travis and Jason Kelce were also there.
9. The Celtics will try to get back on track with a showdown against the Nuggets on Thursday that might not matter much in the standings but promises to be the regular-season game of the year if both teams are healthy. That game tips at 10 p.m. ET on TNT.
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