Noooo! Loss in Cleveland 12/1 – Post-Game Thread

[Fierce1]

Cs and Cavs meet 2 more times this season.

Hopefully we see them meet with both teams fully healthy.

[Larry_Russell]

No Brown
No White
Jrue hurting
KP hurting
Al hurting

The law of averages completly **** on us in the 4th and loving mitchell in the 4th

On a game on December 1st with no real merit to it.


Yeah, Im ok with the loss. I really dont care and nothing changed my opinion that cleveland isnt a top 4 in the east team despite their record as they have been continuously gifted injured teams all season.

[ConstableGeneva]

Going from the 2nd best record in the league to 2nd best record in the league is a tough pill to swallow. Hope we can all recover from this in time.

[redslastlaugh]

Tonight we needed a play in the playbook, down 3 with seconds only remaining, that fades the shooter into the shot immediately on the catch, a la J. Kidd and Rex Chapman. You have to feed the shooter so he catches he ball facing the hoop so if the defender fouls it’s three shots and even a four point opportunity.

Watch on YouTube

For whatever reason, we don’t have a play like this.

[ConstableGeneva]

Tonight we needed a play in the playbook, down 3 with seconds only remaining, that fades the shooter into the shot immediately on the catch, a la J. Kidd and Rex Chapman. You have to feed the shooter so he catches he ball facing the hoop so if the defender fouls it’s three shots and even a four point opportunity.

Watch on YouTube

For whatever reason, we don’t have a play like this.

Except we do. It's collecting dust somewhere in the practice facility.

You can find a couple of catch-and-shoot quick hitter threes here:

Watch on YouTube

We did have a play for JB quick three vs. the Pacers. Maybe Joe is saving all of them for the postseason.

[redslastlaugh]

There’s this classic as well. Larry walks Worthy up the sideline, then a discard, fade to the corner for the catch and release. A thing of beauty, but ‘‘twas not to be

Watch on YouTube

Tonight we needed a play in the playbook, down 3 with seconds only remaining, that fades the shooter into the shot immediately on the catch, a la J. Kidd and Rex Chapman. You have to feed the shooter so he catches he ball facing the hoop so if the defender fouls it’s three shots and even a four point opportunity.

Watch on YouTube

For whatever reason, we don’t have a play like this.

Except we do. It's collecting dust somewhere in the practice facility.

You can find a couple of catch-and-shoot quick hitter threes here:

Watch on YouTube

We did have a play for JB quick three vs. the Pacers. Maybe Joe is saving all of them for the postseason.

[Jellybeans]

Jrue was bad all game but does last few minutes was somehow worse...

[ThePigeon]

Cavs played hard and shot 47% from 3 in order to beat us while we were missing 2 starters and 2 starters played bad (Jrue, Al)
PP is a player. He should close games, no matter what. And shoot the techs if he is in the game
Peterson was a nice revelation, especially on defense. He moves fluidly and knows his role
Hauser played great defense. In the last 2 games he is scrappy, getting steals and deflections. 3 steals this game. Shame he had to foul out at the end
KP and JT pissed me off. Guarded by smaller, weaker defenders the defaulted for contested 2s instead of burying these guys. Sam Merrill made JT shoot an airball!!!
Work on backing these guys up and stuffing them. Learn from PP

We are the better team

[FlatearthZorro]

Mitchell is the best offensive player between these 2 teams and took the game over when it mattered. We will beat them in the playoffs, but it’s gonna be real series.

Im pretty sure its Tatum for their career. Tatum has had way more efficient career so far.
Anyways, Mitchell is a volume shooter and if hes hot, he can do damage.
Still pissed the Cs let this slip in the last 3-4 mins...

[Smart2Nesmith43]

The offense to end was the same thing most of the way. Why Joe? Switch it up!!

By far the weak spot of the present coaching staff is our very simplistic offense, based on getting our star wings going downhill to open up 3PTAs with the drive-and-kick, such that attempting more 3s will eliminate clutch situations. But if a game does come to clutch time, our entire offense is forcing pick-switches into a desired matchup for our wing to attack one-on-one. This is extremely simplistic offense, no way Round it. Down the stretch of close games and in special situations we have no plays designed to move the defense and create an easy look. No coaching staff is perfect and we run sound principles, but x-and-o details is our weakness.

Our very simplistic offense is number one in the league. After being number one in the league last season. The Celtics' offensive rating in clutch time is 129. Maybe the other teams need to simplify their playbook and copy the Celtics ?

[ParticleMan]

it's troubling how we play with pace, movement, and drive-and-kicks all the way until crunchtime and then it devolves into predictable slow-down isos and high p-and-r's for Tatum. I feel like we are paying too much attention to the clock when we are up. Guys need to play without even looking at the clock until 2 mins left, and if we are up double digits then and only then start chewing the clock.

on D i'm annoyed how often guys start going off against us and we just keep playing the exact same scheme. happened against vuc last game, and mitch this game. this is where we miss JB, he has that mano-a-mano mentality and takes things personally. i feel like the rest of the team reflects joe's keep playing the system mantra. that's good 95% of the time but you have to change things up when a guy is going off especially in crunchtime, even if it's just a hard foul. make someone else beat you.

all that said the cavs still needed a heroic effort and two of our starters missing to slip away with a win on their home floor. they are not going to be our biggest challenge in the EC.

[Sweet Serenity]

Some of the Jrue talk is a little crazy. I have zero concerns with him long term. I would be concerned if he was our third option and that could only happen if guys like white and brown are out. It’s clear that role is a little tough on him to meet expectations especially against a good team on the road. He just needs to get out of the shooting funk he’s in, gotta start knocking down the open 3 that they’re giving him.

I do think starting next year it would be smart for him to start coming off the bench and get more rest so he’s fresh come playoff time like we do with Horford.

Would you start Pritchard or Hauser next year ?

[ThePigeon]

it's troubling how we play with pace, movement, and drive-and-kicks all the way until crunchtime and then it devolves into predictable slow-down isos and high p-and-r's for Tatum. I feel like we are paying too much attention to the clock when we are up. Guys need to play without even looking at the clock until 2 mins left, and if we are up double digits then and only then start chewing the clock.

on D i'm annoyed how often guys start going off against us and we just keep playing the exact same scheme. happened against vuc last game, and mitch this game. this is where we miss JB, he has that mano-a-mano mentality and takes things personally. i feel like the rest of the team reflects joe's keep playing the system mantra. that's good 95% of the time but you have to change things up when a guy is going off especially in crunchtime, even if it's just a hard foul. make someone else beat you.

all that said the cavs still needed a heroic effort and two of our starters missing to slip away with a win on their home floor. they are not going to be our biggest challenge in the EC.

Agree with all
Joe is still learning. Maybe he will change something eventually
He learned when to take timely timeouts. I think he can learn how to react better during games

The slowdown pisses me off. Give the ball to JT on the block, like DeRosen or Butler. He can be an efficient scorer there

Also - only 17 assists. A very low number for our team (averaging more than 25 a game)

[Stan34]

It felt like self sabotage by Mazzullla towards the end. Almost as if he wanted a close game to see something.

Mitchell 4 straight buckets and 3 of them were 3s.

If Mitchell is that great, he would've been in the finals already.

He's been doing that since his Utah Jazz days.

I mean always great in the regular season, but always comes up short in the playoffs.

If you think about it, the Cavs needed an explosion from Mitchell and 2 Celtic starters missing for the Cavs to get a win.

Tatum and Brown weren't in the finals either, before we got White. Tatum and Brown would be a .500 type team without White, Jrue and KP. Brad knew that, and surrounded them with really good players.

Stop, please. The Jays had multiple ECF without White. And the year he arrived, he played so and so. He has been mediocre. We were 5/6 games over .500 before he came. First part of that season the team didn't play any D. Udoka changed the mentality of the team.
Even said that White is a great player and he is not the player he was 3 years ago.

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[Fierce1]

Low assist number in this game is because the Cs only shot 40% from the field.

Bad shooting night for the Cs.

[Celts17Pride]

Going from the 2nd best record in the league to 2nd best record in the league is a tough pill to swallow. Hope we can all recover from this in time.

We don't have much time, another game tonight.

[GoCeltics123]

I hate losing games by giving a team something you knew would happen over and over again. Everybody knew Mitchell would shoot until he missed and we let him hit like 4 in a row. Tatum gets trapped relentlessly and we let the other super star do whatever he wants. Very annoying.

Mazzulla will never win me over as an in game coach. Maybe he is the best in the league at motivating and player management and all that, but to me he is still one of the worst ones in the league in games. Everything we do is so predictable and so conservative and when something different is tried it seems to always be too late.

They didn't lose that game because of Joe Mazzulla are you **** serious lmao

Joe coached worse in the first game against them than this one, he ran Queta for like 20 minutes when he was a -20 or whatever. Also one of the worst in-game coaches in the league is so laughably embarrassing I'm not going to even touch that one.

You want to double Mitchell? You want to let Mobley have PP on him or something like that when you do that? Seems like a brilliant idea lmao. The whole reason we cruised in the Finals is that we didn't have to double Luka or Kyrie like other teams had to, and didn't overreact to them scoring on ISOs.

Mitchell had 20 in the 4th on 6/6, 4/4 from 3 on pretty damn good defense. Sometimes you gotta tip your cap. Celtics lost the game when they missed like 10 straight shots to open the 4th

[Fierce1]

Let's not forget the Celtics won all the clutch games in the playoffs and finals.

Joe was the one who made JB shoot that corner 3 against the Pacers in Game 1 of the ECF.

Without that game tying 3, the Cs would have lost.

And it was not predictable because Tatum was expected to take the final shot because he's the #1 option.

[phincsfan]

Went cold at the worst time last night. Isht happens

[Shak_Celts]

The offense to end was the same thing most of the way. Why Joe? Switch it up!!

By far the weak spot of the present coaching staff is our very simplistic offense, based on getting our star wings going downhill to open up 3PTAs with the drive-and-kick, such that attempting more 3s will eliminate clutch situations. But if a game does come to clutch time, our entire offense is forcing pick-switches into a desired matchup for our wing to attack one-on-one. This is extremely simplistic offense, no way Round it. Down the stretch of close games and in special situations we have no plays designed to move the defense and create an easy look. No coaching staff is perfect and we run sound principles, but x-and-o details is our weakness.

Our very simplistic offense is number one in the league. After being number one in the league last season. The Celtics' offensive rating in clutch time is 129. Maybe the other teams need to simplify their playbook and copy the Celtics ?

All i know is, it worked in the playoffs, I’m not worried about anything too much. Just didn’t have it last night, shouldnt have bled it so much. It felt like holding on.

Looking back, it was more missing than not good looks. Al needed to hit one those threes. Especially the one JT gave him that’s was eerily similar to game 5 Finals.