Celts hit bump in road
Come up short vs. Indiana
INDIANAPOLIS — It was the start of what promised to be a long, harrowing trip, starting in Indianapolis, with Denver, Phoenix, Salt Lake City and Portland the other distant pins in the road map – four of them, anyway, playoff teams.
But even with Kyrie Irving hitting two 3-pointers in the last 1:07, the Celtics didn’t have enough in crunch time in last night’s 102-101 loss to Indiana. The loss snapped a four-game winning streak.
Victor Oladipo’s gamewinning 3-pointer over Al Horford and Irving, the pullup exclamation point on the Pacer guard’s 24-point performance, sent the Celtics off to Denver with a sting. But Irving, despite giving the Celtics a chance to win this one, remembered something other than his two late bombs. It was the result of his back-cut with 11.7 seconds left, following two Oladipo free throws that cut the Celtics lead to 101-99, that was on the guard’s mind.
“I smoked the layup. That’s what it comes down to,” he said of missing a shot after getting a little too far under the basket. “Great play call by coach Stevens, and I just smoked that layup. Then Vic comes down, and I pressure him at halfcourt and Al gets a pretty good contest on him for three, and he hits a big shot and (we) turned the ball over at the end of the game.
“It was just my body position. That was fully my responsibility to get open and finish that shot, regardless of where the pass was.”
Oladipo also foiled the Celtics’ last chance with 3.4 seconds left by getting to a cross-court inbound pass from Gordon Hayward to Jayson Tatum on the far side of the paint. Oladipo’s deflection essentially ran out the clock. Hayward, sent in for the play, had been on the bench for the previous 5:22. “The play was called and
Jayson was on the seal,” said Hayward. “We didn’t have any timeouts so I thought he could seal off his man and then maybe catch it and shoot it and that’s all that happened.” Asked if he thought he was done for the night prior to that play, Hayward said,
“I did, but I’ve got to make a better read on that. It’s definitely tough to come in cold like that but I’ve got to be better.”
Ultimately, though, the Celtics were undone by their own uneven performance, including a cold start that led to a 45-45 halftime tie, followed by a 72-72 tie at the end of a wild third quarter that found the Celtics digging out of a six-point hole. The lead changed hands eight times in the third, and another 13 in the fourth.
But from Tyreke Evans’ seven-point fourth to 10 from Oladipo over the same stretch, the Celtics lost track of Indiana’s best scorers at the wrong time.
“He made big shots,” Brad Stevens said of Irving. “When we go back and look at the film, our presence on the ball, late wasn’t as good as it was the first half, all the way to Tyreke getting going to the end of the game when Oladipo pulled up. Other than that we played really hard and Oladipo made a good shot.”
Irving, playing the most aggressive defense of his career, also picked up three first half fouls that resulted in a long time on the bench. “He only played 27 minutes because he was in foul trouble early,” said Stevens.
“I don’t sit guys with three fouls, but they were going at him in the post pretty good trying to get that fourth, so we decided to sit him.”
Unfortunately for the Celtics, not enough offense was available elsewhere, despite a season-high 23 points off the bench by Marcus Morris, including 4-for-6 3-point shooting. Ultimately a 41.4 shooting performance, with players like Hayward (2-for-10), Jaylen Brown (5-for-14) and Marcus Smart (1-for-7), wasn’t enough