BOSTON — When the Boston Celtics honored Isaiah Thomas on Monday night, it provided a jarring juxtaposition between the IT-era Celtics and the current iteration of Gang Green.
Thomas’ teams — and specifically that much-romanticized 2016-17 squad — were a gritty bunch of overachievers who only went down kicking and screaming, routinely overcoming adversity, and whatever the team lacked in overall talent, by giving every ounce of effort and fight they had. That team had Thomas endlessly professing his love of all things Boston and embracing everything about the city and the franchise.
This year’s squad oozes with talent and potential, and yet so frequently seems unable — or unwilling — to harness it all. On Monday night, a boneheaded end-of-third-quarter sequence seemed to sap the team's energy and the Celtics offered little resistance as the Nuggets kept them at arm’s length for much of the fourth quarter en route to a 114-105 triumph.
The 2018-19 Celtics have often been a maddening team to watch, not only because they so rarely harness their collective talents — particularly for 48 consistent minutes — but because they don’t often display the mental toughness that has become the hallmark of Brad Stevens’ teams.
We saw glimpses in recent weeks of this team maybe starting to show that missing resolve. The Celtics scrapped their way to a couple of quality wins over the Kings, twice rallying from a double-digit deficit in a win here last week. Then, despite kicking away a 25-point lead during a visit from the Hawks on Saturday, Boston clamped down late to ensure there wasn’t another entry into the astoundingly crowded “worst loss of the year” competition.
But, in the spirit of the 2018-19 Celtics, it was two steps forward, one step back with Monday’s loss.
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"We’ll be in that position again where something bad happens and the air gets taken out of your team a little bit, and you have to respond,” said Stevens. “Tonight, we didn’t do that.”
Later, he expanded on why that toughness is so important.
“You see it in the playoffs all the time … the circumstances of the game and the emotions of the game are hard to move past. But the great ones do. The great teams do and that’s just what you want to get to. You want to get tough enough as a group to be able to move onto what’s next. That doesn’t always happen.
"Every game’s unique but you want to be able to do that as much of the time as possible. So I do think that, even though it is Game 70, 71, whatever it is, yeah, you remember this. You can sit back in the huddle and say, ‘When that happened last time, this ain’t happening again.’ And there can be a resolve in that, there can be a team-ness in that. But it’s going to take us to sit in there and do it for it to happen. And that’ll be — we’ll see.”
Stevens deserved a bit of the blame for Monday's game slipping away. He made a curious choice to call a timeout with 1.1 seconds remaining late in the third quarter in hopes of drawing up a play to get his team a last-gasp attempt. But the Celtics were taking the ball out beneath their own basket and Marcus Morris tried to force a long heave to Jaylen Brown that sailed out of bounds, giving the Nuggets another possession.
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That’s when Jaylen Brown fell asleep at the wheel, allowing Torrey Craig to sneak back door for an easy dunk that tied the game at 80. It was a demoralizing sequence and the Celtics’ body language at the quarter break spoke volumes about whether they were ready to respond.
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The Nuggets got an easy alley-oop lob to Mason Plumlee on the first play of the fourth quarter, and the Celtics never recovered.
Stevens admitted he probably shouldn’t have called the timeout. Morris took blame for an unnecessary pass that, if it just ticks off someone’s hands, the clock at least runs out on the quarter.
But it’s these sort of moments that make you wonder just what this Celtics team is capable of. The team has essentially clung to the notion that — in an eyesore of a regular season, these sort of nights can be shrugged off now — but will they play with the effort and discipline necessary to thrive in the postseason? Is it reasonable to expect them to truly flip a switch?
"These type of games kinda wake you up and show you that you can’t be relaxed in the fourth quarter,” said Morris. "Take [the loss], we learn from it, get better.
“We just gotta do better.”
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Listen, those Thomas-era teams had plenty of bad nights. For all their success, they also got steamrolled by the Cavaliers in the postseason. In the end, the talent disparity caught up with them.
The 2018-19 Celtics have all the necessary talent to compete for a title. The question is whether they are willing to work to be great. Can they show the sort of mental toughness and resolve that’s been so fleeting this season?
Wednesday’s visit to Philadelphia provides yet another opportunity to show what this team is capable of against elite-level competition. It’s particularly important given the jockeying for spots Nos. 3-5 in the East, with this being the final head-to-head matchup with the 76ers (and two more games with Indiana loom before the season’s end).
The No. 3 seed is there for the taking if Boston wants to work for it. That there’s uncertainty about whether they are willing to fight for that tells you a bit about where this team stands.
A lot of the frustrations of this season will be washed away if this team turns it on in the playoffs, if they reach their potential. But the regular-season wave has been tough to ride. This team remains hard for fans to wrap their arms around.
But Thomas showed it doesn’t take much. A healthy dose of toughness, effort, and heart go a long way towards endearing a team. The 2018-19 Celtics haven’t shown yet that they are willing to embrace those hallmarks and, thus, the fan base has struggled to embrace them.
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