It’s two bad about C’s
Fall again to Bulls at Garden
The last person they needed applying a needle was Rajon Rondo, but that’s where the Celtics ended up last night.
“Our team, I looked around and a few times in the game guys were putting their heads down, I think getting down on themselves,” said Celtics guard Avery Bradley. “But as a team we have to stay together. The other team is looking at that. They’re using that as motivation for themselves.
“I could even hear Rondo like, ‘Yeah, they gave up. They gave up.’ But you never can let a team see that. You have to continue to be positive and go out there and play hard no matter what the outcome is.”
But the Celtics, now the first No. 1 seed in NBA history to drop its first two games at home to a No. 8 seed in a seven-game series, are now walking the razor’s edge of first-round elimination.
And they’re making the same mistakes, with an ineffective front line that continues to have trouble with their Bulls counterparts. Al Horford, Amir Johnson and Kelly Olynyk continued a trend last night in a 111-97 loss to the Bulls in Game 2, knocking the Celtics into that 0-2 hole.
The Celtics were beaten by a wide range of Bulls, beyond the 22 points from Jimmy Butler and the reemergence of Playoff Rondo, who fell one rebound shy of a triple double with 11 points, 14 assists and nine boards.
But the Celtics were once again gashed by Robin Lopez (18 points, eight rebounds, five offensive), and basically watched as Dwyane Wade summoned his old playoff self with 10 of his 22 points in the fourth quarter, including two dagger-like 3’s.
Though Isaiah Thomas finished with 20 points, the grieving point guard struggled under Chicago’s relentless trapping, shooting an uncharacteristic 7-for-13 from the line and turning the ball over five times.
But there also comes a time when Thomas, who left for Seattle this morning to attend the funeral and memorial service of his younger sister Chyna, can’t be the only player bailing out the offense.
“I’m pretty sure everyone in this locker room has their own opinions but we’ll get together as a group, and we’ll see what (coach) Brad (Stevens) took away from this game, and we’ll get better,” said a hopeful Bradley.
“You can’t make any excuses. Obviously, it’s heavy on everyone’s heart what happened to Isaiah and his family, and we were there for Isaiah. But we can’t continue to say that’s the reason. We just want to be there for him, continue to be there, and play hard. At the end of the day we should want to play hard for each other and for him. Like, we can’t sit there and keep saying, ‘Oh, we’re down because too much is going on.’ We have to play hard no matter what. You go through a lot throughout a season. You’re going to face a lot of adversity. And the best teams overcome any type of adversity. And that’s what type of team we need to be.”
Thomas, scoring and struggling at the same time, missed two free throws with 11:10 left in the fourth quarter while the Bulls were building an 89-75 lead.
Thomas answered with a drive, followed by an Olynyk 3-pointer, but the Celtics were in a helpless kind of chase mode.
The crusher was a 3-pointer from the top of the arc from Wade, seconds after a Marcus Smart 3-pointer had cut the Chicago lead to 95-86. Wade followed with a short jumper and Cristiano Felicio dunked over a disinterested collection of defenders the next time down to push the Celtics into a 102-86 deficit with 6:01 left.
Wade capped off the run he started with another 3-pointer, this time for a 105-86 lead.
It was left to rookie Jaylen Brown to get a Celtics run started — a 6-0 burst that was snuffed by a Paul Zipser 3-pointer.
The crowd was now in a hurry to leave.
“We have to get ready to play great on Friday. That’s what our focus has to be; we don’t have any other choice,” Stevens said. “And that’s what we said in the locker room, and that’s it. We’ll dissect the film, we’ll go through it, we’ll figure out what we didn’t do well