Well, the Celtics managed to cram about six minutes of competent basketball into four quarters this afternoon and lost disgracefully to a team that is even worse than the Los Angeles Lakers. The final score, 100-97, does not reflect how poorly Boston played for the bulk of this game.
The first quarter of this matinee game was really nice, if you are either a Nets fan or you love watching guys miss their rotations defending the pick and roll. The Celtics help and rotations were so bad during this quarter that I was playing the Flinstones running sound effect in my head.
The score at the end of one was 31-29 in favor of one of the worst teams in the NBA. A team even worse than the Lakers was shooting even better than the Lakers against one of the NBA’s “better” defenses.
The second quarter was about the same as the first. The Celtics’ questionable defense continued and their offense got much worse. The Celtics’ offense in the second was as ugly as those ‘washed the whites with the colors’ dirty gray sleeved jerseys.
And then there was the officiating…
The refs were as unprepared for this game, seemingly, as the team in green and white gray.
Halfway through the second Boston went on a 9-0 run, or rather, a brisk 9-0 walk, and let me tell you, it’s going to be a long time before you see a 9-0 run this ugly. It took the Celtics seven possessions to score those nine points, thanks to a miss and some terrible (5/8) free throw shooting. It was not so much a run as it was a demonstration that the Nets are not very good.
At the end of the quarter, the Celtics had close that two point gap….to one point! They hit the locker room down 56-55.
When the third quarter started, the Celtics kept playing soft on defense and eventually a frustrated Sullinger tackled Lopez, got hit with a flagrant-1, and the refs passed around some technicals and the game resumed–and the Nets went on a 9-0 run. So that didn’t really work out.
The rest of the third quarter was pretty ugly as well. Jarrett Jack’s knee went out on him and he fell to the court on a fast break, and Isaiah Thomas got T’ed up, and the Nets stretched the lead to 13 points and the Celtics just sort of looked like they didn’t really care who won the game, or what the final score was. A Smart three point play closed the gap to ten, 81-71 at the end of the period.
It’s not entirely clear if the Celtics started playing better in the fourth, or if the Nets’ issues caught up with them after they lost Jarett Jack. At any rate, the Nets scored all of two points over the first three and a half minutes of the fourth and Boston scored twelve, and thus the game was tied, but that was as close as the Celtics could get. Brooklyn quickly got the lead back up to seven, and that was that. Sure, there was some last minute craziness, but that kind of stuff almost never works. If you can’t assemble a solid body of work over the course of the whole game, that fourth quarter push probably won’t be enough either.
Green
Those few minutes in the fourth quarter when Boston played like they meant it.
Gross
Everything else.
Greenlights
Amir Johnson gives the double-swat to Thaddeus Young in the paint! pic.twitter.com/eTlDphR705
— Boston Celtics (@celtics) January 2, 2016
Grid
Celtics turned the ball over 14 times, shot 39% from the field and 22% from behind the line, and looked worse than they did on Wednesday.
