April 2, 2025
Tyler Herro scored a game-high 25 points as the Heat welcomed the Celtics back home with a tough loss, snapping the Celtics’ winning streak at nine with a 124-103 loss.
Here are the takeaways.
Unless you had tickets to that game, you can’t reasonably be too angry at the Celtics for what was unquestionably a lackluster performance, and frankly, if you bought tickets to that game, you also probably could have seen that one coming.
For one thing, the return game after time on the road is often a letdown, and Wednesday’s game – which came at the end of a particularly long trip – was no exception. Boston looked uninspired and the kind of feisty that a person gets when they are very tired. Pelle Larsson – a fine rookie, but also a relatively unremarkable player at this stage in his career – angered Jayson Tatum so much in the second half that rim microphones caught him telling Larsson off for touching the ball after a made basket. Joe Mazzulla picked up a technical after going ballistic on an official until he was nearly ejected. Tatum picked up a technical for arguing vociferously on a borderline call that wouldn’t have earned him free throws.
Meanwhile, the Celtics (you may have heard) have been absolutely engulfed in flames over the last few weeks. On Wednesday, they were pursuing their 10th consecutive win, and they rode back into TD Garden on the wings of a 6-0 road trip.
Somewhat predictably, they were also short-handed – both Kristaps Porzingis and Al Horford were out, as was Jrue Holiday (AND Miles Norris IF anyone even CARES).
The aim here isn’t to make excuses for the Celtics, but rather to say that if there was a night when the Celtics were likely to lose their winning streak, Wednesday was a prime candidate. That the end of their streak came against a surging Heat team is a bitter pill the Celtics (and certainly Celtics fans) will have to swallow.
“You’re on the road and kind of just relaxing. You come back home and life is – I don’t know, I wish I had an answer,” Derrick White said. “Luckily that was our last long road trip of the year and we can try to figure that out next year.”
Anderson hurt the Celtics repeatedly at the start of the fourth quarter, keeping the Celtics at bay when they threatened to get themselves back in the game.
Anderson is an unconventional player, and unconventional players can be troublesome for a Celtics team built to excel in the modern NBA. His stop-and-go style of play allowed him to sneak past Celtics defenders, and the Heat spent much of the game targeting favorable matchups like Neemias Queta and Luke Kornet. When bigs got switched onto Anderson, he took advantage.
Something about Anderson’s slithery drives and his oddly difficult-to-block arsenal of push and flip shots in the paint can give the Celtics fits. If these teams meet in the next few weeks, Anderson will be staring down a much stronger Celtics team with a playoff-level scouting report, but on Wednesday, he finished with 19 points on 7-for-11 shooting and was instrumental in the fourth quarter.
Tatum has shown glimpses of what his true MVP form could look like over the course of this season – sustainable two-way production with a healthy dose of scoring, distributing and rebounding while taking on a plethora of difficult defensive assignments – but he is still prone to the occasional brutal performance, and Wednesday’s performance certainly qualified.
Tatum simply could not find the range. He finished with 16 points on abysmal 4-for-17 shooting, including 2-for-9 from deep. The Heat didn’t do anything particularly special – Kel’el Ware deserves some credit for defending him well and seemed to throw him off at times, especially when he closed out to the 3-point line, but Tatum also missed some shots that he usually makes, and his performance was marred by a lengthy stretch from midway through the first quarter to midway into the third when he missed nine straight shots.
After a season of singing Tatum’s praises, it only seems fair that we should also acknowledge his bad games, because they still really tend to stick out.
We should start by noting that Brown took perhaps the single most detrimental shot to the Celtics’ attempt to rally back from a 20-point deficit in the second half when he launched an inexplicable semi-transition 3-pointer with 7:22 remaining, which hit only backboard with a horribly loud “clunk.”
Prior to the miss, the Celtics had walked the lead down to five and had a chance to steal a win they barely deserved. After Brown’s thud of a jumper, however, the Heat went on a game-ending 11-1 run, capped by Davion Mitchell’s triple with 5:04 remaining that sent Joe Mazzulla out onto the floor to call timeout and get his bench mob in.
Other than that one abysmal shot, Brown was very solid – 24 points, 10-for-20 shooting, nine rebounds and four assists.
Brown has been dealing with a knee issue, and the Celtics really need him to be healthy when the postseason rolls around.
“I thought he was good,” Joe Mazzulla said. “I think getting his feet under him, I liked the way he got to his spots. I like the way he competed defensively. To me, he just continues to look better and better each night, much more comfortable out there. So that was a positive for us and good to see.”
Brown agreed, although he side-stepped a question about whether the pain he feels in his knee is something that could hurt him in the future, saying only “for now, it hurts.”
“Today was a good step forward,” he added. “I got some stuff lined up with the medical staff in order to be and feel better come playoffs. But as for now, just mentally working through not feeling great, but still able to find ways to be effective, I guess.”
In one of their worst games of the season, the Celtics put together one of their best two-way sequences.
Down 15 in the first half, Derrick White tracked a fast break back against Kyle Anderson and Bam Adebayo. First, White forced Anderson to fumble his dribble. When Bam Adebayo recovered the fumble, White stuck his hand in and knocked the ball away, jump-starting a Celtics advantage the other way. When the Celtics have an advantage, they are deadly – they moved the ball around the perimeter expertly, forcing the Heat to rotate until the ball found Payton Pritchard in the corner for an open 3-pointer.
The Celtics are seven games ahead of the Knicks in the standings with six games remaining, and they are now five games behind the Cavaliers. They are on pace for a second straight 60-win campaign despite a lot of injuries, a championship hangover, and a December/January swoon. They are largely healthy. They are all but finished with the regular season, having accomplished everything they could hope to accomplish.
And yet, Wednesday’s game still rankled them.
“I mean, we’re all pissed,” Mazzulla said.”I mean, we all hate losing. And that was my message. It was a good reminder that losing still sucks. So I love the fact that the staff are all miserable. Guys are pissed. Not happy about it, but we’ve got to come back and do it again the next day. I think it’s great. Like you said, at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter or have much of an impact, but it still sucks, and we’re all miserable right now.”
However, Wednesday’s game was notable because it raised the chances that the Celtics could see the Heat in the first round. The Heat are ninth in the standings, but they are just 1.5 games behind the Magic and Hawks. The seventh and eight seeds will take on each other for the right to face the Celtics in the first round.
Luke Kornet conceded that the Celtics do see the standings, but he called the situation “a bit weird.”
“You can’t really put too much credence into it,” Kornet said. “You just kind of have to focus on yourself and playing good basketball and the things that you need to.”
The Celtics will take on the Suns on Friday at TD Garden looking to bounce back from Wednesday’s loss. They close their three-game homestand against the Wizards on Sunday before hitting the road for the final time in the regular season next week.
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