As well as they have performed in man and two-man-down situations this season, perhaps the power drain is starting to catch up to the Celtics.
After another rough defensive performance in the first half, and yet again not enough scoring off the bench, the Celtics were worn down in last night’s 99-94 loss to Utah.
This time Gordon Hayward (knee contusion) and Jaylen Brown (hamstring) were the casualties, with Jayson Tatum dogged by double teams and blitzes all night long. The Celtics star, who had scored at least 32 points in his previous five games, struggled for his 18 points, to the tune of 7-for-19 shooting.
Though Marcus Smart scrambled together a 29-point performance, including 6-for-15 gunning from downtown, it was far from enough. Kemba Walker returned to the lineup after a one-game managed absence and couldn’t manage much more with 13 points on 5-for-17 shooting.
Overall the Celtics shot 9-for-35 from 3-point range, compared to Utah’s hot 37.8 percent (17-for-45) number.
And it started with a stretch that Brad Stevens admittedly thought had the sight and touch of “fool’s gold.”
After shooting 12-for-23 in the first quarter, the Celtics shot 23-for-71 the rest of the way. After shooting 5-for-9 from downtown in the first, they shot 5-for-27 over the last three quarters.
They never recovered offensively as Utah used an 8-2 run over the last 4:39 of the third quarter to leverage their fourth straight win. The Jazz last lost on Feb. 26 to the Celtics in Salt Lake City.
“Their bench is really good, (Joe) Ingles and (Jordan) Clarkson, hard to stop, really hard to play against,” said Brad Stevens. “You knew they wouldn’t be able to play that way the whole game, but I thought that first group did a good job and we had a number of good stretches during the game, but it wasn’t good enough to beat them tonight.
“I was pleased with the way we defended for the most part – maybe a couple of stretches in the middle of the first half (weren’t so hot) – but other than that I was happy with how we defended. We held a good offensive team to 99. We just couldn’t score enough to win it.”
But as the Celtics continue to play without their full lineup – the Walker/Tatum/Brown/Hayward/Smart combination has been more rumor than fact this season – their bench scoring is starting to come up a little dry.
The Celtics bench produced 13 points on 5-for-18 shooting last night, with nine of those points coming from Brad Wanamaker.
Stevens admittedly can’t evaluate his bench, though, until his starting lineup is intact.
“It’s so hard to know,” said Stevens. “We had a guy (Semi Ojeleye) score 22 the other night, we’ve had a number of our guys play well off the bench. And we’ve never really had our full bench intact because we’ve never had our full starters intact. Hard to know. When we’re full we’ll see how it looks and see how it goes, but it is what it is. Thought we had a lot of good things tonight. Just didn’t score well enough. Some of that was decision-making at the rim, where they did a great job, some of it was excellent pressure defense by them, and some of it was missed open shots. Just part of it. I don’t want to make any generalizations about our bench until I see our whole team moving forward.”
But, as Stevens admitted, last night against a playoff opponent the Celtics simply couldn’t generate enough offense. It didn’t help that Walker, still being monitored because of a sore left knee, is being used in short spurts designed to ease him back into the lineup.
“It’s on us. I don’t know what’s going on out there,” Smart said of last night’s painful stretches in the offensive end. “It’s like we let other teams pressure and take us out of the game. When that happens this is the outcome. We have fix that. We have to be the aggressor. We have to punch first and then when we get punched we’ve got to keep punching.”
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Depleted Celtics come up short to Utah - Boston Herald
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