Cosidering the way the Celtics have looked in their last three games/losses, Toronto could be one of the last teams they want to see walking into the Garden Wednesday. Then again, the Raptors may be just the smelling salt the Celts need to shake them alive.
But even if they achieve the desired result here, we know by now that it’s no indicator of future performance — or even future effort. And if the Shamrock A.C. allows sand to be kicked in its collective face on national television, the green panic buttons will be getting a workout.
And it seems at this stage that one more good gust of wind could damage the Celtics in a way that time won’t be able to heal.
They’ve been falling back in these first three months on the fact there is time to work out their rotations and work out their roles, but with each giant step in the right direction, there is an ensuing stumble backward.
So four straight wins at home were followed by three consecutive losses on this last road trip, culminating in falling behind by 27 to the Nets on Monday before a nice but misleading comeback to lose by just seven.
And while some are seeing Kyrie Irving’s tough love statements as just what the team needs, others involved are wondering whether cracks are starting to appear.
He spoke about the requirements to succeed under expectations after Saturday’s loss in Orlando. “These are things I don’t think some of my teammates have faced of just every single day,” he said. “It’s not easy to be great. So the things you’re doing, that you’ve done your entire career of being able to coast by in certain situations and you’ve gotten away with your youth and stuff like that, being on a championship ballclub, you can’t get away with that.”
On Monday morning, Irving essentially said he wasn’t calling out the Celtic kids, in particular. And after the club lost that night in a game he missed with a right quad contusion, he reportedly offered encouragement that how the C’s played during their comeback was the way they need to perform all the time.
“After the game, Kyrie came in and talked to us about it,” said Brad Wanamaker, who played well with 13 points in 26 minutes. “You know, we’ve got to play the way we played in the last couple of minutes starting off the game. That’s just something we’ve got to do as a team. It comes from watching film and trusting each other. … We all talked together and told each other what we can improve on. It was a positive message that we want to do what we did in the last minutes from the jump.”
Said Jaylen Brown, “We’ve got to be more accountable as a group. It’s not one guy’s fault. It’s not young guys’, old guys’ fault. It’s everybody. We all have to be accountable to turn this thing around. There’s stretches where we play good basketball, and stretches we don’t, but we all have to have each other’s backs.”
He added later, “We’ve just got to have each other’s backs at the end of the day. We can’t make comments. We can’t point fingers. We just have to continue to empower each other and have each other’s backs. If we don’t, if we start pointing fingers, everybody’s going to go into their own little shells. We’ve got to continue to play basketball. It starts from the top to the bottom. Not from the bottom to the top but the top to the bottom. We’ve got to continue to empower each other and make the best of this. We have a lot of talent, and we know what we’re capable of doing. We have to go out there and do it — playing free, playing loose, having fun.”
One veteran is backing Brown up on his point.
“I’m not with the young guys, young guys, young guys (expletive),” Marcus Morris said. “It’s just, do you want to do it? Either you do want to do it or you don’t want to do it. It’s not all on them. It’s on the entire team.”
And, despite the evidence of the last few days, Morris doesn’t want to hear about the Celtics being in a bad place.
“Bad?” he said. “I wouldn’t use that word. I wouldn’t use the word ‘bad.’ We lost a couple of games. You know, everybody’s going to flip (expletive) about it, but, I mean, I think we can fix it still. I think everything’s fixable here. We’re still above .500. We’re still pushing, still doing everything. It’s still there for us.”
It will be there tonight for the Celts when the team with the best record in the league darkens their door.
“I mean, (expletive), we lost this one, so that’s the only thing we can look forward to,” Morris said. “They’ve been playing really well. That’s a veteran team coming in esday. I guess we’ll see where we’re at.”
But he added the opponent doesn’t really matter on the Celts’ scale of need for this one.
“I wouldn’t say because of playing Toronto. I think it’s more of an inner thing,” Morris said. “We need to be better, man. We had a four-game homestand where we had almost 35-plus assists each game. And then we got on the road and it changed. So that’s the biggest thing, not just the assists, but how things change. We can’t go from being very consistent to just not being consistent at all. That’s not a trait of a good team.”
But right now it’s a trait of the Celtics.
