Struggle, in the NBA, is relative. Given the chance to swap their troubles for the ones facing the Boston Celtics — the defending NBA champions, the winningest team in the association over the last half-decade, the owners of the NBA’s third-best record and net rating heading into Friday’s matchup with the Magic — you’d imagine that just about every team in the league, save maybe Cleveland and Oklahoma City, would take the trade without a second thought.
But while teams (and fanbases) might experience struggle on a sliding scale, the same goes for success. After steamrolling through the regular season and playoffs en route to Banner 18, the standard in Boston is sky high; over the last month, the C’s haven’t consistently met it.
Joe Mazzulla says its a great compliment to have the media grill him and the Celtics postgame despite improving to 28-11 with a win tonight
“It sounds like a morgue in here. And that’s how it should be.”
— Cameron Tabatabaie (@CTabatabaie) January 13, 2025
After starting their title defense 21-5, the Celtics are now 7-7 over the last month — and one C.J. McCollum near-buzzer-beater away from being 6-8, on the franchise’s first three-game losing streak since the 2023 Eastern Conference finals. They’ve been more or less fine in the aggregate: ninth in offensive efficiency, seventh on defense, outscoring opponents by 5.2 points per 100 possessions outside of garbage time over the last month, according to Cleaning the Glass. But they’ve been more erratic, especially late in games, ranking just 24th in net rating in the fourth quarter over the past month, getting outscored by 4.8 points-per-100.
The Celtics have lost four of their last seven games in the friendly confines of TD Garden; they lost just four regular-season home games total last season. And in the last two weeks alone, they’ve suffered double-digit defeats at the hands of the Thunder (understandable!), the Kings without De’Aaron Fox (hmm, seems weird, but hey, new coach bump?) and the Raptors (wait, what?).
“We’re going through some s*** right now,” MVP candidate Jayson Tatum told reporters on Wednesday after a 110-97 loss to a frankly brutal Toronto team — a listless performance that center Kristaps Porziņģis said featured “no spirit” and “no personality,” and that has become par for the course for the champs of late.
To some degree, you can chalk games like the close shave against the Pelicans or the dispiriting losses to the Kings and Raptors up to the time-honored truism about the wearying challenge unique to champions — of having the bullseye on your back every night, of getting every opponent’s best shot, of how much more difficult it is to do the little things to stay on the top of the mountain after finally reaching the summit.
“I think we’ve got to take some ownership. … We’ve got to look in the mirror and man up,” Tatum recently said. “We’ve just got to be better. We fully believe in ourselves, the things we can do when we’re fully locked in, and we’ve done it time and time again. We’ve just had some lapses recently, and we’ve just got to get back on track.”
Tatum offered those remarks after the Celtics’ Christmas Day loss to the 76ers. Watching the losses to Sacramento and Toronto, though, it seemed safe to say that the C’s have not fully restored their level of lock-in:
Over the full season, only the Rockets, Magic and 76ers have more consistently and thoroughly won the possession battle than Boston. That has actually held up over the past month, with the Celtics continuing to outperform opponents on the offensive glass, commit fewer turnovers than they create, and generate more free throws than they allow.
Lose that battle in an individual game, though — by allowing Toronto to rebound 32% of its missed shots, or committing eight live-ball turnovers against New Orleans, or losing the turnover and offensive rebounding battle so decisively that Sacramento winds up taking 18 more shots — and your margin for error vanishes, and you’ve got to win beyond the arc. Have a hard time doing that, and a 60-win team can start to look like a .500 team pretty damn quick.
And there’s the rub: While better effort and attention to detail obviously never hurts, the issue likely has less to do with insufficient focus and more to do with the same problem and solution that the C’s used to bludgeon the league last season. It is — surprise! — the 3-point shooting.
The Celtics led the NBA in points scored per possession as of Dec. 15. They’re ninth since, a drop-off of 5.7 points per 100 possessions — the fourth-largest decline in the NBA in this span. The only offenses to fall off more precipitously? A Nets team that traded away two starters; a Mavericks team that’s been without Luka Dončić and Kyrie Irving for much of that stretch; and a Heat team that’s spent nearly that entire period in a staring contest with its best player.
The driving force behind the downturn? A monthlong reversal of fortune from distance.
Deep trouble
The Celtics shot 37.2% from deep through their first 26 games, 12th in the NBA. That itself represented a steep descent from last season’s 38.8% mark, but one that Joe Mazzulla’s squad mitigated by cranking up the long-range volume and ripping off the knob, with Boston on pace to become the first team in NBA history to take more than half of its shots from beyond the arc. During this .500 stretch, though? Boston has splashed just 34.2% of its triples — 22nd in the NBA in that span.
A Celtics team that made fewer than a third of their 3-point attempts in just 24 of its 101 games last season (23.8%) has already done it 13 times in 40 games this season (32.5%) — including six of its last 14. The shooting slump has been an equal-opportunity offender, with nearly every member of the C’s rotation shooting worse from deep over the last month than they were earlier in the season, headlined by Jaylen Brown (down 7.7 percentage points to 26.7%), Derrick White (down 8.7 percentage points to 31.5%) and Al Horford (down 10 percentage points to 30.6%).
Perhaps even more notable than Boston making 3.3 fewer 3-pointers per game, though, is that the volume’s down to more manageable levels. The Celtics still lead the league in long-range launches during this stretch, but the gap between them and the rest of the pack has narrowed considerably.
“We got to get those up,” Horford recently told reporters. “We had those numbers way up earlier in the season, and now it seems like we’re taking less.”
Defenses deserve some credit there; multiple Celtics have noted recently that teams seem to be keying in more diligently on limiting those attempts by switching perimeter screens and running shooters off the line. They’re capable of countering that: Boston’s taking and converting a higher share of its shots at the rim over the last 14 games, and its wing corps of Tatum, Brown, White and Jrue Holiday have plenty of practice at punishing switch-heavy schemes by mismatch-hunting weaker defenders, whether by taking smaller guards down into the post or drawing slower-footed bigs out into deep water on the perimeter.
“Mazzulla-ball” is all about buying in bulk, though, and the combination of opposing defenses taking a chunk out of Boston’s 3-point volume and many of Boston’s shooters sliding simultaneously has sparked an offensive swoon. Pair that with the C’s, never a particularly high rim-pressure team, attacking the basket even less on average (from 38.6 drives per game down to 35.8 in this stretch) and generating even fewer trips to the free-throw line (from 19.4 free-throw attempts per 100 possessions down to 15.9), and you’ve got a recipe for the NBA’s best half-court offense dropping down to just-inside-the-top-10.
That’s still good! In the context of where the Celtics have been and where they hope to go again, though, it’s not good enough … especially when the other guys experience a reversal of fortune, too. During Boston’s 21-5 start, Celtics opponents hit 35% of their 3s; over the past 14 games, they’re up to 37.2%.
It’s all connected. Keep misfiring, and you embolden opponents to try to junk things up against you to prolong your offensive misery. (After finishing just 12 offensive possessions against zone defense through the first two months of the season, the Celtics have faced 31 since Christmas, according to Synergy’s game tracking.) Prolong the offensive misery, and you put more pressure on your defense to continue stringing together stops against teams that are chock full of shooters and playmakers themselves.
“[If] you’re coming down missing them and they’re coming down making them, it’s going to take a toll on you,” Mazzulla said.
Continually paying that toll makes it even harder to lock into a rhythm, especially when you’re dealing with overlapping injuries and unavailability. The starting lineup of Tatum, Brown, White, Holiday and Porziņģis — the unit that was sixth in the NBA in minutes played and fifth in plus-minus last season — has appeared in just 10 of the first 40 games, owing largely to Porziņģis missing the opening month recovering from offseason ankle surgery.
That group blitzed opponents by 11 points per 100 possessions last season, behind a suffocating perimeter defense backstopped by a 7-foot-3 shot-swatter, and an overwhelming five-out offense in which every player could dribble, pass, shoot, drive and screen. This season, though, with Porziņģis still working his way back into form as a floor-spacing weapon and high-post failsafe, they’ve been outscored by 11.8 points-per-100 in their 147 shared minutes, scoring and defending at bottom-of-the-league levels.
In fairness, 147 minutes is a pretty small sample size — Mazzulla recently described this year’s version of his starting five as “essentially in a training camp form” — and thus particularly susceptible to the vicissitudes of shooting variance. To wit: Opponents shot 36.7% from 3 against the C’s starters last season; that’s up to an obscene 48.3% thus far this season.
Clichés become clichés for a reason; people call the NBA a “make-or-miss league” because, well, it is. If you build an offense around generating as many open 3-pointers as possible, often at the expense of working your way into more paint touches and trips to the line, and you spend more than a month shooting below league-average on those open 3-pointers while your opponents start to shoot better, you’re in for hard times — no matter how recently you hung a banner.
“Just because we were this last year, you can’t take for granted the details, habits, execution, togetherness, trust — all that has to be rebuilt,” Mazzulla said. “I think sometimes when you have the same team, we have this expectation that we’re just going to pick up there, and it’s different.”
Trust the process?
Building back up doesn’t figure to get any easier in the short term, with the Celtics facing a weekend back-to-back against the Magic and Hawks, both of whom have already beaten Boston this season, before heading out on a West Coast swing featuring dates with the Warriors, Clippers, Lakers and Mavericks, followed by a visit from former coach Ime Udoka and his surging Rockets. But some scuffling through the doldrums doesn’t necessarily sound the death knell for a Boston team that continues to feature a microscopic turnover rate, that remains elite at limiting transition opportunities, and that has actually been generating a higher overall quality of shot during this .500 stretch, according to Cleaning the Glass’ “location effective field goal percentage” metric, which looks at all of the shots a team takes and asks how efficiently it would score if its players hit a league-average share of them. Variance can break the other way, too; a few more shots rattling in might be all the Celtics need to break free and get back on track.
That’s how Mazzulla sees it, anyway. Seemingly forever overflowing with an eminently quotable blend of optimism and masochism, he termed the team’s current turmoil “a beautiful place to be in.” He also emphasized that he’s not going to let a few weeks of errant shooting shake his belief in what gives the Celtics the best chance to win — the brand of ball that won it all last season, and that had them on a 66-win pace just a month ago.
“What I do know is we have to keep up the process of fighting for the best shot, giving up the best shots, making the necessary plays to win, executing, building trust, building accountability amongst each other,” Mazzulla said. “We just have to continue to work that process with each other.”
But for a Celtics team that now sits a whopping six games behind first-place Cleveland — and just two games ahead of the third-place Knicks — it feels like that process needs to start leading to better, more familiar results pretty soon.
“Maybe you don’t want to play your best basketball at the beginning of January,” Tatum recently told reporters. “We’ve been through this before. We’ve still got a lot of time left to get back to our identity. It’s not supposed to be easy.”
