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Tyrese Haliburton, Pacers pull away from scuffling Celtics: 8 takeaways
The Celtics have now lost four of their last six games, and they are 5-5 in their last 10.
Tyrese Haliburton and the Pacers won the season series against the Celtics on Sunday, bouncing back from a blowout to deliver a 123-114 loss to a scuffling Celtics team.
Here are the takeaways.
1. The Celtics couldn’t get stops.
The Celtics spent much of Sunday’s game trying to rally back from a deficit, which is very difficult to do when you have to score seemingly every possession to make up for what happened on the other end.
Over the last two weeks, the Celtics have the seventh-best defensive rating in the NBA according to Cleaning the Glass, which feels high given some of their struggles.
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On Sunday, the defense was particularly off-kilter. The Celtics gave up 98 points in the first three quarters, and when they rallied in the fourth quarter to make it a closer contest in the fourth quarter, they completely lost control of things and gave up a 13-0 run that put the game out of reach and quieted the TD Garden crowd.
The Pacers paraded to the rim repeatedly, outsourcing the Celtics 66-48 in the paint and 18-4 in transition. Haliburton seemed to find the lane particularly clear, but a number of other Pacers were relatively unimpeded as they cruised around screens and found gaps in the defense.
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The Celtics missed Jrue Holiday, whose on-ball defense might have made a difference, and they really missed Kristaps Porzingis, whose long arms and towering height might have dissuaded some of the Pacers’ forays.
But part of the challenge this season looks like it might be finding ways to get stops even when lineups aren’t exactly what the Celtics would prefer. Whether that’s energy and effort or whether its players like Sam Hauser finding ways to guard their yard, the Celtics will continue to struggle if they aren’t a lot better on the defensive end.
“We’ve got to emphasize that,” Jaylen Brown said. “We’ve got to get back to emphasizing the defensive side of the ball. It’s kind of slipped over the last few games, our intensity. Teams are pressuring us and being physical with us. We’ve got to do the same stuff back to them. We did some good stuff in spots, but just not enough.”
Brown added that the Celtics have had good defensive moments.
However: “Defense is something that you’ve got to have effort,” he said. “We haven’t had as much intensity and effort that we need. That’s pretty much it.”
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2. The Celtics also couldn’t make 3-pointers (at least when it mattered).
The Celtics weren’t exactly lighting the parquet floor on fire with their 3-point shooting, but they were shooting 35.7 percent from deep entering the fourth quarter.
But as the Pacers pulled away again, the Celtics tried to shoot themselves out of their hole, and they were entirely unsuccessful. They finished 1-for-12 in the final frame, including 1-for-10 before the bench unit came in to close things out in the final two minutes, which pulled their 3-point percentage below the waves and left it a bedraggled 29.6 percent (16-for-54).
“I thought we dribble-drove and hit the paint,” Joe Mazzulla said. “I would say there was probably situationally in the fourth quarter when we cut it to five, there were probably two or three that I thought we could have got a better one on. But I thought we drove the ball, and the ball touched the paint.”
Two stats seem relevant here.
The first is the Celtics’ 3-point percentage in December, which dropped to a paltry 33.8 percent after Sunday’s game. Entering Sunday’s action, that percentage would place the Celtics 25th in the NBA over that span.
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The second is the Celtics win/loss splits: The Celtics are now shooting 37.9 percent from three in their wins and 32.6 percent in losses. Reducing a team’s success to its 3-point shooting seems, well, reductive, but the 741 shoe feels like it might fit so far this season.
3. Jaylen Brown was impressive again.
The Celtics wasted another impressive outing by Jaylen Brown, who continued his recent run by scoring 31 points to go with four rebounds and six assists. Brown continues to be a somewhat unique – and thus perhaps especially necessary – player on Boston’s roster in that he builds his offensive game inside out and embraces opportunities to seek out contact. While Brown was just 3-for-5 at the free-throw line, he earned three and-one opportunities.
The Celtics’ offense is at its best when the stars are cooking and the 3-pointers are falling. Tatum wasn’t bad (22 points, 8-for-17 shooting, nine rebounds, six assists) and Brown was excellent, but when 3-pointers aren’t falling around them, the wheels can come off quickly.
“Get to the paint, get to the free throw line, drive the ball, be more physical,” Brown said when a reporter asked how the Celtics can score when they aren’t making 3-pointers. “I made an emphasis to do that tonight, and I thought it worked well for me.
“I thought we also got a lot of great looks and made a lot of great reads. We had a lot of open shots that just didn’t go in for whatever reason. We’ll look at it, but ultimately yeah, we gotta be more physical.”
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4. A tough stretch.
The Celtics have now lost four of their last six games, and they are 5-5 in their last 10. They never lost four out of six last season — the last time they did so was in March of 2023.
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Point to the injuries, call the poor 3-point shooting an outlier, or choose from a number of other options to explain away this stretch, but something simply doesn’t seem to be clicking right now for the Celtics.
“I think this might be the toughest stretch that I’ve been on since I’ve been here on the Celtics,” Derrick White said, which was a reminder that he was not part of the 2021 and early 2022 teams that were known for underperforming.
White added that there are “ups and downs” every season, but he is confident this team will pull it together.
“Just trust the character in the locker room,” White said. “All the types of guys that are in that locker room, those are the type of guys I want to go to war with. So I’m confident in that.”
Tatum said he doesn’t believe the Celtics are struggling because of overconfidence.
“I think we’re just at a point in the season where we’re not happy where we’re at, and we all have to understand that we’ve played a part in where we’re at right now,” Tatum said. “We’ve just got to be better.”
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5. Jordan Walsh got rotation minutes again.
The second-year wing played 19 minutes again on Sunday after getting extended run against the Pacers on Friday. Walsh didn’t score, but he did record both a steal and a block, and he pulled down three rebounds.
“His growth has been on pace of what we want to see,” Tatum said. “We feel like we’re going to really need him to have the success that we want to as a team. It’s about letting him know that he’s important and we need him and it’s his job to be ready and stay ready when his time is called.”
So should we expect to see Walsh in the rotation now?
“I mean, I like Jordan a lot,” Mazzulla said. “But we’re down two players. So I would say it’s our health that has presented that opportunity. He’s done a good job, but I would say the main reason is we’ve been down two guys.”
6. Tatum broke his double-double streak.
Low on the list of priorities from Sunday’s game was the end of Tatum’s double-double streak, which ended at eight when he came up one rebound short.
Still, Tatum is now averaging 9.6 rebounds per game – up from 8.1 last year.
“A lot of the time, I’m guarding the big man down there, boxing out with the big guys,” Tatum said. “Just another way to assert myself into the game.”
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7. The Celtics and Pacers might be a real rivalry.
The Pacers seemed to really relish their win on Sunday.
Haliburton mocked the TD Garden crowd at one point after a silencing run pushed the Pacers’ lead back to double digits. Pascal Siakam blew a couple of kisses after hitting a 3-pointer with the game well out of reach in the fourth. Thomas Bryant bellowed and flexed after a couple dunks in the first quarter. And Aaron Nesmith, the former Celtics first-round pick who seems to hold a specific animosity for the Celtics for having the audacity to trade him to a better situation for both sides, wasn’t even active as he continues to recover from an ankle sprain.
No team gave the Celtics a tougher push in last year’s Eastern Conference playoffs than the Pacers, even though the Eastern Conference finals were a sweep. This year, the Pacers have won the regular-season series against the defending champions after Sunday’s win.
The Celtics would still clearly be the favorites in a seven-game series, but the Pacers are a tough out, and they seem to be building the kind of personal grievance against the Celtics that can carry a team to higher levels in the postseason.
“That was a playoff-like intensity,” Brown said. “Give credit to Indiana — they came out from the tip, you could see it, they were trying to pressure us, trying to get into me, trying to get into my body, trying to turn me over. As a team, you’ve just got to meet that challenge, every single night.”
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6. A big road trip looms.
The Celtics have one more game in 2024, facing the Raptors at 3 p.m. on Tuesday. They will then open 2025 with a tough road trip, starting with a back-to-back against the Timberwolves and Rockets on Thursday and Friday followed by games against the Thunder and Nuggets before they return to TD Garden.
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