Jaylen Brown drops 35, but Celtics fall to competitive, short-handed Magic: 9 takeaways
Jayson Tatum was ruled out of Monday's game with an illness.
Jaylen Brown scored 35 points on Monday, but the Jayson-Tatum-less Celtics dropped a surprising loss to a short-handed but hard-nosed Magic team, falling 108-104.
Here are the takeaways.
A chaotic finish.
Where should we even start trying to explain how the game ended?
With 1:43 left and the Celtics trailing by six, Jaylen Brown tracked down an important rebound in the corner. He was immediately swarmed, and Jalen Suggs knocked the ball out of his hands and dove trying to possess it. Brown dove to the ground as well and knocked it forward, and then it was a rugby scrum. When the smoke cleared, Derrick White and Magic forward Tristan Da Silva had a jump ball.
White won the tip (albeit in a roundabout way), and Jrue Holiday hit a three to close the gap.
The Celtics got a stop, and Brown bodied Suggs into the paint for a basket to close it further.
Now trailing by one, the Celtics got another stop and created a decent look for Al Horford in the corner, but the veteran big man clanked the 3-pointer.
On the other end, the Magic created a good look for Da Silva, who hit what looked like a dagger.
Joe Mazzulla didn’t call a timeout, and the Celtics raced ahead with the ball, but the officials whistled a timeout anyway thinking Mazzulla had asked for one. That gave the Magic a chance to set their defense despite the Celtics’ futile protests, and Brown’s last 3-point attempt wasn’t particularly close as the Celtics dropped two out of three for the first time this season.
What do we make of the Magic?
So far this season, we haven’t seen much that looks particularly convincing as a challenger to the Celtics, especially in the Eastern Conference.
The Magic, however, are a potentially interesting exception.
On the one hand, they are the worst 3-point shooting team in the NBA, which seems ill-suited to deal with the Celtics’ math problem.
On the other, Monday’s game suggested that the Magic might have the dogs to change the Celtics’ math problem.
The Magic are, of course, very short-handed — they don’t have Paolo Banchero or Franz Wagner right now, and they won’t have Mo Wagner for the rest of the year. What they do have are a bunch of role players who play defense like a mosh pit and accept the fact that they will be whistled for fouls as the price to be paid for playing a little more physically than most teams are used to feeling.
Having Jayson Tatum will make life much easier for the Celtics, and it’s not clear how well some of Orlando’s margin victories (which we will get to in a minute) would hold up over the course of a series. But it’s not like the Celtics were without a superstar on Monday — Brown (who we will also get to shortly) scored 35.
The biggest difference was that the Magic hounded the rest of the Celtics away from playing their game.
The Celtics missed a ton of 3-pointers.
The Magic did need a few things to go right, and they got a big one: The Celtics went 8-for-32 behind the 3-point arc. The Celtics might not shoot that badly again, but it was very telling that Orlando held the Celtics to nine fewer 3-point attempts than their previous season low. The Magic also made and attempted more triples (13-for-33), which doesn’t happen often (and doesn’t bode well for Boston when it does).
We mentioned after the Celtics beat the Bulls on Saturday that their 3-point numbers have slipped recently, and Monday’s brickfest brought their total down to 33.6 percent in the last 10 games. Again, that’s not a huge slip from their season average (36.3 percent), but it’s statistically significant, especially given their volume.
The Celtics also turned the ball over a ton.
Again, if you want to beat the Celtics, a few things need to go right, and this was another one: The Celtics normally take care of the ball well, but they turned it over 18 times, including five each by Brown, Derrick White and Jrue Holiday. They also recorded just 13 assists.
At the risk of overhyping how the Magic played on Monday, they deserve a lot of credit for that as well — one player having a high-turnover night can be attributed to a bad evening. Three of the team’s primary ball-handlers struggling enormously suggests that the defense had something to do with it, especially when you consider how the Magic limited the 3-point attempts.
Moe Wagner may be mad at the Celtics
Wagner, as we noted above, out for the season, and his extremely excited teammates gave him a shoutout after Monday’s win.
“This one was for Mo Wagner,” a very serious Cole Anthony said looking at the camera.
Wagner was dealt to the Celtics as part of a three-team deal in March 2021, and he appeared in nine games before he was waived, clearing the path for his arrival in Orlando.
Fair enough — nobody likes being waived. But if Wagner had (for some reason) stayed in Boston, he would be playing Luke Kornet’s role, and he wouldn’t be on the same team as his brother.
Maybe all’s well as end’s well.
A confusing melee.
The hyper-competitive game resulted in surprisingly few technicals, but there was one altercation, albeit a confusing one.
Here’s what happened, as best we can tell.
As Derrick White launched a 3-pointer, Kentavious Caldwell-Pope was whistled for a foul. The Magic protested and as they did so, Kristaps Porzingis tried to move the game along to the free-throw line so the officials wouldn’t give the Magic time to review. As he did so, he and Suggs started talking some trash (which really didn’t even look particularly unfriendly), and Magic center Goga Bitadze decided to break it up. In doing so, he inadvertently grabbed Porzingis’ neck, which caused a fracas.
The final ruling: No foul on Caldwell-Pope, matching technicals on Suggs and Porzingis and an ejection for Bitadze.
That led to this moment, which we believe fans on social media misinterpreted.
It’s possible Bitadze thought Porzingis was ejected and was taunting him, but our best guess is that Bitadze didn’t mean to grab Porzingis’ neck and was apologizing to Porzingis by waving, thinking he had gotten just a technical for the play. He was then surprised to learn he was ejected, which is the shocked reaction caught by the cameras.
In any case, the entire sequence took quite a while to sort out and added plenty of chop to an already choppy game.
A big Jaylen Brown game
The Celtics couldn’t take advantage of an impressive performance by Brown, who scored in a lot of different ways — posting up smaller Magic players, getting into the paint, and blowing by defenders with dribble moves like this.
Brown is a star very capable of carrying the scoring load, and he has shown plenty of promise in an increased role as a facilitator. He doesn’t quite seem to bend defenses as far as Tatum as a passer, which mattered against a Magic team that treated Monday’s contest like a Game 7 but probably wouldn’t against most other teams if he scored 35. Brown also shot 1-for-7 from deep, which meant that all of his baskets had to be a high degree of difficulty (impressively, he went 14-for-22 inside the arc).
Some stats we don’t think can hold.
It will be difficult for the Celtics to beat the Magic if – in addition to the missed threes and turnovers – Orlando can hold:
- Kristaps Porzingis to 2-for-10 from the field
- Al Horford to 3-for-10 from the field
- Payton Pritchard to 1-for-5 from three
- Sam Hauser shotless (0-for-0) in 16 minutes
The guess here is that some of those statistics will normalize the next time these teams meet. Still, the Magic proved they are a formidable opponent, and while the Celtics would be favored in a playoff series, there might not be a team in the Eastern Conference the Celtics would be happier to avoid in the postseason if they can swing it.
A Christmas Day showdown.
Don’t look now, but the 12th-place 76ers have won seven of their last 10 games, including a thrilling victory led by Tyrese Maxey and old friend Guerschon Yabusele on Monday. The Sixers visit TD Garden for the 5 p.m. Christmas Day slot on Wednesday.
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