The Boston Celtics don’t care, and it shows

“You never want to have these moments, but somehow, someway, they tend to happen throughout the course of 82 games,” said Jayson Tatum via CLNS Media after the Boston Celtics got their posteriors handed to them by the Washington Wizards, a team in the running to land a top pick in the 2023 NBA draft that was without two of their best players.

“They count as one, whether it’s right now or whether it’s in December,” added the St. Louis native of the outcome created by the Celtics’ lack of urgency to put themselves in the best position possible to earn a title they supposedly care about winning.

“It’s still a loss and you just have got to move on from it.”

In uttering those words, Tatum was both being brutally honest, but also telling a lie. The honesty is in the fact that the Celtics DO need to move on from such losses.

The lie is that “somehow, someway, they tend to happen”. Tatum and the rest of his teammates are under no illusions regarding what caused this loss, even if they say otherwise publicly. They didn’t care enough to play with the level of energy needed, and it cost them.

This is not how a team that is serious about winning it all behaves.

Excuses abounded postgame, with head coach Joe Mazzulla saying (via CLNS Media) the loss was “just one of those nights” that happen to NBA teams from time to time.

Except with Boston, those nights can be predicted in advance — 10 of the Celtics’ 24 losses came against teams without a winning record, and are almost always related to a lack of effort and respect for their opponents — or the concept of building the habits of a championship team.

And while the ratio of such losses is indeed within the realm of what one would want to see over the course of the season, that they appear to be on the uptick again with three such losses over the last two weeks (vs. the Houston Rockets, Utah Jazz, and now Wizards) is more than a little concerning.