Celtics implode down the stretch, lose to Trae Young-led Hawks: 8 takeaways
Bad decisions plagued the Celtics near the end of regulation, allowing the Hawks to tie the game and force overtime.
The Celtics had to work for it, but they managed to find a creative way to fall 119-115 to Trae Young and the Hawks on Saturday.
Here are the takeaways.
The Celtics had the game in hand.
We can’t stress enough the extent to which the Celtics blew this one.
The Hawks put up a good fight and certainly had their own opportunities to pull away, but the Celtics seemed to have done just enough to squeak out the victory with 30 seconds remaining.
With the game tied at 100, Jaylen Brown created some space for himself with a beautiful turnaround jumper, and the Celtics took the lead.
On the other end, the Hawks threw the ball away, and they started to implode – Trae Young complained his way into a technical, apparently under the impression that Jrue Holiday was grabbing him, and the Celtics went up by three as Tatum made the free throw.
That should have been that — the Celtics should have been able to inbound the ball, make a couple of free throws and finish out the win.
Instead, Holiday escaped near the rim and took a pass from Tatum. Instead of holding onto the ball (or laying it in) and going up by two possessions, Holiday gave the Hawks life by throwing it out of bounds in the first of two disastrously bad decisions down the stretch.
On the other end, the Celtics intentionally fouled Trae Young (and we would like to take this opportunity to reiterate that the NBA needs to change its foul-up-by-three rules for the sake of the flow of exciting basketball games). Young made both free throws, and the Hawks fouled Tatum, sending him to the line with a chance to go up two.
Tatum went 1-for-2, putting the Celtics up by two.
Then Holiday made his second disastrously bad decision, inexplicably fouling Young again. Predictably, the career 87.3 percent free-throw shooter made both, Tatum missed a turnaround jumper, and the game went to overtime.
The overtime period was scrappy, with several stops and starts and one altercation that nearly got Tatum — who was already on one technical — ejected (if you want to be a little entertained after yet another dispiriting loss, note Joe Mazzulla pumping his fist and clapping as the two teams beefed with one another).
But the Celtics nearly had a chance to snatch a win out of a well-earned loss in the final seconds when Jalen Johnson missed a pair of free throws with the Hawks leading by one.
Instead, Onyeka Okongwu thoroughly outmaneuvered Neemias Queta, grabbed the offensive rebound and made two free throws when he was fouled. The Hawks played out the string effectively the rest of the way.
The Celtics could have done several things better to win, but perhaps most frustrating for Celtics fans will be the fact that even with all of their struggles, they still could have (and should have) won on Saturday.
Instead, they will embark on a lengthy road trip with the good vibes created by beating the Magic on Friday largely erased.
“Nobody in here is used to losing or wants to lose, so it’s definitely frustration,” Derrick White said. “But we’ve just got to stick together. And I mean, everybody believes in one another, everybody’s done a lot of great things with with this team, and so we believe in each other, and just keep going.”
Holiday says his second foul wasn’t intentional.
Holiday appeared to be fouling Young intentionally on the play that allowed Young to the game, but he told reporters postgame that wasn’t the case.
“Honestly, just trying to keep him going to the basket,” Holiday said. “It wasn’t on purpose.”
He also took responsibility for the turnover that kept the game within reach for the Hawks, noting that “there’s a lot of things I could have done differently.”
“I think we had the game won,” Holiday said. “I’ve got to make some better plays. Make a better pass to JB, or maybe if I hold onto the ball, get free throws, it’s a different situation. I don’t foul Trae, we’re still up 2. So this game is on me, and execution on my part has to be better.”
Derrick White said he trusts Holiday “100 percent of the time.”
“It’s never on one guy,” White said. “He does so much different stuff. I mean, he forced the turnover, basically, before that. So it’s never on one guy, it’s not on Jrue. There’s a lot of stuff I could have done better, and so we just got to just stick together as a team and get through this together.”
Mazzulla seemed mildly amused postgame.
Mazzulla, who never misses an opportunity to gently challenge reporters in his postgame comments, took issue with the idea that the loss was “demoralizing.”
“There’s zero fear whatsoever,” he said. “If anything, there’s excitement, and this is the journey. So sign me up for this.”
“You look demoralized,” he added with a smile to the reporter.
To be clear though, Mazzulla knows a result like Saturday isn’t acceptable.
“I always go back to ‘What were the expectations’ from the standpoint of, ‘Do we think it’s always going to go the way we think?’ And I care more about how we respond by the way we prepare, by the way we communicate together as a team, and by the way we play, so that’s the most important thing.
“But by no means — I can’t stress that enough, there’s an expectation to win. We’re not doing it. It’s not good enough. We have to be better.”
Mazzulla pointed out two other stretches that swung the game in addition to the chaotic finish: The Celtics’ 15-point second quarter, which saw the Hawks flip a 12-point deficit into a three-point lead at halftime, and a 10-2 run by the Hawks when the Celtics led 85-75.
“We just have to execute better on those things — a team calls a timeout, you’re up 10, it can’t be a 10-2 run after that,” Mazzulla said. “You can’t have a 15-point quarter, and then you have to execute down the stretch. It’s that simple.”
The Celtics couldn’t shoot (again).
The Celtics shot well against the Magic, and it didn’t fix their issues (whatever those issues might be). As a team, they were 40-for-104 (38.5 percent) from the field. From three, they were 15-for-52 (28.8 percent). Their saving grace — or at least, their near-saving grace — was that the Hawks were somehow worse from three: 9-for-37 (24.3 percent).
The individual stats are brutal:
- Jaylen Brown was 9-for-27 and 2-for-9 from three.
- Tatum was 7-for-21 and 2-for-9 from three as well.
- Derrick White was 5-for-16 from three alone, and 7-for-20 overall.
The shooting, it seems, will continue until the percentages increase. Morale is nowhere to be found.
Jaylen Brown bounced his head off the ground.
Here’s a clip of a fall Brown took in overtime. Don’t watch it if you’re squeamish.
Brown stayed in the game, and while we here fully acknowledge our lack of a medical degree, that decision felt questionable given the direct, unbraced hit Brown’s head administered to the parquet floor. Here’s hoping he’s okay.
Luke Kornet was good as a starter.
The Celtics opted to play both Kristaps Porzingis and Al Horford on the front end of their back-to-back, and while Porzingis played sparingly and hinted that he might go the second night as well, the Celtics instead went to Kornet to start in their place.
They weren’t disappointed. Kornet finished with a nice stat line — 17 points, 7-for-9 shooting and seven rebounds — and he was deeply impactful on both ends. Perhaps most notably, he created six second-chance opportunities with offensive boards, as well as four steals, all of which came in the first quarter.
Maybe one of the more confusing decisions of the game was Mazzulla going with Queta over Kornet in overtime. The Hawks picked on Queta defensively even before the aforementioned offensive rebound that Okongwu snagged.
Kornet might have made a two-way difference in the final five minutes. The Celtics have been 5.0 points per 100 possessions better defensively with Kornet on the floor rather than off this season, which is 86th percentile league-wide and the best on the team by a relatively wide margin. Even on a night when nothing was easy for the Celtics, the presence of Kornet once again made having one injury-prone starting center with a 38-year-old back-up feasible for the Celtics.
Sam Hauser missed a point-blank dunk.
As the Celtics struggled to score, maybe no single play summed it up better than a fast break late in the third quarter.
With less than a minute remaining as the Celtics started to put some things together, Tatum snuck into a passing lane and picked off a pass by Trae Young. With options to dish to two different teammates streaking ahead of him, Tatum opted for Hauser, who was sprinting ahead of the play.
Hauser appeared to have a wide open dunk, and he went up looking confident.
Whoops.
No major harm was done — the Hawks stepped out of bounds, then committed a foul that sent the Celtics to the line and still allowed them to get off a 2-for-1 shot.
Still, the noise TD Garden made — roaring as Hauser broke away and then groaning as his dunk inexplicably bounced out — was both appropriate and pretty funny.
Hauser finished 0-for-7 from the field and 0-for-5 from three.
The Celtics go west.
The Celtics will now hit the road once again. On Monday at 5 p.m., they take on the Warriors before two games on Wednesday and Thursday against the Clippers and Lakers.
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