BOSTON – Despite suffering two tough losses at home over the weekend, the Boston Celtics are far from even thinking about reaching for the panic button.
Not after how far they’ve come this season and with the playoffs right around the corner.
On Friday night, the C’s had their most frustrating defeat of the season, as they coughed up a 28-point lead to the Brooklyn Nets in a 115-105 loss. They followed that up with a double-overtime thriller against the New York Knicks Sunday night, which ended in heartbreak by a score of 131-129.
“I think we've just hit a little rough patch,” Jayson Tatum said after a 40-point, 11-rebound, six-assist effort. “We would like to win every game coming out of the (All-Star) break, but that probably wasn't going to happen. We're still in a great position and we still got time to figure it out, and we're going to … We know what we're capable of."
This marks only the sixth time this season that Boston has lost two in a row, and it’s still keeping pace with the first-place Milwaukee Bucks, who snapped a 14-game win streak on Saturday and sit 1.5 games ahead of the second-place C’s in the East standings.
Even though they let go of double-digit first-half leads in both matchups, the Celtics showed much more fight in Sunday’s game as they battled back from 11-down in the fourth quarter to force overtime. Jaylen Brown played a massive role in the comeback, making a clutch and-1 lay-up and free throw with 12.9 seconds left in the fourth quarter before snagging a game-saving steal on the other end.
Boston had a chance to win on its final shot of the second overtime period, but Al Horford missed what would’ve been his career-high seventh 3-pointer of the night from the right corner just before time expired.
“We were able to maintain a level of poise and focus and execution, and I think that's something that we didn't have last game,” said head coach Joe Mazzulla. “I think that's something that you're gonna need, trying to get to where we want to go to, is just handle the ebbs and flows of the game.”
They also realize that there are ebbs and flows to the season, which is why Mazzulla feels “zero concern” amid this rough patch, even if it’s so close to the playoffs.
“Just because there are 17 games left doesn’t mean that there is any difference in how a stretch of the season would go,” Mazzulla said. “You obviously want to be playing your best basketball later in the season as you get closer to the playoffs, but this is a tough stretch and whatever this stretch has, we have to learn from it so that we can use it later in the year.”
The road doesn’t get any easier from here. The Celtics head to Cleveland Monday for the second night of a back-to-back and without much of an opportunity to rest after having four players play at least 44 minutes in Sunday’s double-OT contest. They’ll then come home for one game against Portland before embarking on a six-game road trip that will take them from Atlanta to Sacramento and everywhere in between.
Over the course of that time, the Celtics hope they can find the same spark that ignited their league-wide dominance throughout the first half of the season.
“We’ve got to get our groove back,” said Tatum, “which I'm confident we will, and get back to being ourselves and playing with that swagger on both ends of the floor for 48 minutes.”