Luka rips C’s heart out
Celtics fall below .500 mark with tough loss to Mavericks
It was a nationally-televised opportunity to shine, with Jaylen Brown voted by coaches to his first NBA All-Star game, and Jayson Tatum to his second.
MAVERICKS 110 CELTICS 107
But on a mixed bag of a night at both ends of the floor, Luka Doncic was able to remind the other two why he’s an all-star starter.
The Dallas star hit two late 3-pointers off of switches, the second for the win with one-tenth of a second left, to sink the Celtics, 110-107. The loss was the Celtics’ second straight, and dropped them below .500 to 15-16.
“I don’t feel very much like an all-star, because we’re under .500,” said Brown. “This is the most we’ve lost since I’ve been a Celtic. Let’s put some games together and make a run.”
Doncic orchestrated the dynamic close to the night with 31 points, 10 rebounds, eight assists, and just enough panache to outshine the Celtics trio of Tatum (28 points), Brown (29) and, after a chilly start, Kemba Walker (21, four 3-pointers).
But it didn’t necessarily have to come to this. The Celtics were equally strafed by the Mavericks’ Jalen Brunson, who built his 22 points on 5-for-7 3-point shooting. The Mavs shot just over 39% from downtown (13-for-33) and, in a current Celtics defensive trend, had great success in the paint, where they scored 48 points.
Brad Stevens has said it before, but last night simply drove the coach’s point home — these Celtics simply aren’t very good defensively.
“I do think we’re not as good defensively as we have been in the last few years,” he said. “So that’s another part of it, right? And I think we’ve played hard in the last three games for the better part of them. Obviously the last 15 minutes of New Orleans wasn’t pretty, but I think we’ve improved in that area. But I still don’t think we’re where you want to be if you want to be good.”
With Marcus Smart out for an indeterminate amount of time — certainly not until after the early March all-star break — the situation also doesn’t figure to improve.
Smart’s return is more part of a long term prospect this season than anything immediate, and Stevens’ hopes are clearly pinned on this team coming together over the second half of the season.
“I think what you get as a coach is little tidbits of hope, but you get told something over the course of a season,” said Stevens. “You get real information over the course of 20, 30, 40, 50 games. We can play with that kind of poise in the last five minutes of games the rest of the year, then we’ll be better than we’ve been up to this point. But we have to improve a lot. We had some real good individual performances. I thought, obviously I’m looking at the stat sheet, Jaylen, Jayson and Kemba all had big moments, but it wasn’t quite enough to get us over the top. Again, it took two tremendous shots by a great player to beat us.”
Fouling up, again: Dallas was in the penalty for the last seven minutes of the fourth quarter, as the Celtics continue to hurt themselves with untimely fouling. “It’s a killer. The thing about is that they had a foul to give on the last play,” Stevens said of a sequence during their last play following Doncic’s second bomb. “I heard Rick (Carlisle) yelling, ‘Give it!’ I think they want to give the foul, right? We don’t have a foul to give. So if we can switch up into Doncic’s air space at 50 feet and foul him, that’s a totally different deal. We’ve gotta balance — we’re trying to be more physical because we need to be. But we’ve gotta balance that with fouling. I think we’re getting a lot of fouls that we can improve upon.”
Trust? Though the Celtics may look at times as if they don’t trust the next pass, Tatum wants to assure you that’s not so.
“That’s part of being a team. Trusting each other regardless of the result,” he said. “You don’t stop trusting a guy because he missed a shot.”