Another debacle for C’s
Show no heart in blowout to Hawks
Marcus Smart checked in last night, drawing a technical foul from the bench while the Hawks were in the midst of a runaway second quarter, and why not? At that point, any change to the pace was welcome.
Trae Young had just inbounded the ball off of Grant Williams’ back, collected the self-pass and laid it in. Brad Stevens has never looked more tired than during his pre-game Zoom media session..
Celtics owner Wyc Grousbeck had given a radio interview on 98.5 The Sports Hub earlier in the day, stated his support for Stevens, and also admitted without hesitation that at the moment the Celtics are not a contender.
Not even close, after their 127-112 loss to Atlanta on Wednesday night, extending their losing streak to three straight games. The Hawks opened with a 40-point first quarter, Young and Danilo Gallinari combined for 49 first-half points, the latter with seven straight 3-pointers, and the embarrassment carried on from there.
Gallinari (38 points, 10 3-pointers) and Young (33) both broke the 30-point barrier, marking the seventh straight game that the Celtics have yielded the floor to a 30plus point-scorer. The Hawks’ duo shot a combined 14-for-20 from 3-point range, and overall Atlanta’s 23 3-pointers were the most by a Celtics opponent in franchise history.
The Celtics, by comparison, spent the night in a meat locker. They finished 3-for-24 from downtown, with Jayson Tatum (13 points, 4-for-20) and Jaylen Brown (17, 6-for16) shooting a combined 1-for-14 from the beyond arc.
But based on the number of open shots taken by Gallinari and Young throughout the night — their ability to score with unchallenged impunity — the Celtics simply didn’t have the defensive will Wednesday night.
Stevens said he deserves to be “first and foremost on that list with where we are.” Tatum said something similar.
“We have to take some accountability. I have to take accountability as one of the leaders and being that guy. I have to be better. I have to be more vocal,” he said. “I have to kind of be the example, especially knowing that we lost two tough games, playing a back-to-back. I take a lot of accountability for just the way we played today, I guess, and have been playing. We got four games till the break. Four very important games because I think the time is now. Like I said earlier, we don’t have much time, or we don’t have any time to relax. We gotta dig deep and we gotta figure it out.”
Brown, whose naming to his first-ever all-star game was ruined by Tuesday’s loss in Dallas, may be even angrier now.
“You’ve just got to do it. We listen to him,” he said of Stevens. “Obviously game to game things change, but you’ve got to execute each and every night, and I think it’s been a challenge for this group to go from game to game with no time in between and execute the game plans. I can tell whatever the focus is, it’s not there. It’s not enough. It’s almost as if it’s like — I don’t know. But it just isn’t there. But we’ve just got to be better going game to game with the right enthusiasm and the right mentality for each game, which is tough. But we’ve got to be able to do it.”
Stevens, like Tatum, pointed to the team’s last four games before the all-star break, starting Friday at home against Indiana, as an opportunity for redemption.
“I just told them in the locker room, nobody’s happy about how things are going, we have four games before the break, and these four games from a mental energy, a physical energy, everything we have, are as pivotal a four games as we’ll play all season,” said the Celtics coach. “So our focus will go to that. This is a ... this is a tough one. But, if anything, I think the first two games on the trip we gave ourselves a chance. Tonight we never did. Obviously, very frustrated.
“I know to get (it) back is to dive on the floor, is to take charges, is to sprint to help your teammates up, is to fight for every single possession,” said Stevens. “And that’s our charge. And I don’t know how to say it any more clearly than that, but it’ll be said in whatever way it needs to be said, and we just need to find — make sure that we’re doing our job. Listen, none of us are happy with the job that we have done, and I should be first and foremost on that list with where we are. That said, I also realize that we’re in a situation where we have a lot of guys going through it for the first time and there is a confidence to winning that you gain from earning winning. And we have a lot of guys that haven’t done that, we have some that have. And, you know, we’ll make sure that we do everything we can to earn that confidence with our work.”