ATLANTA — Jayson Tatum strolled up the court with eight minutes remaining and drew an eight second violation. With the Celtics trailing by one point — their 30-point lead already blown — and the crunch time that decided the game minutes away, one turnover didn’t swing the outcome. It still embodied the loss.
“We just took our foot off the gas,” Jaylen Brown said. “Mindset … we got a little casual, we got a little distracted and it cost us.”
Three of the Hawks’ key players sat injured. The Celtics started Brown and Tatum at guard with Jrue Holiday and Derrick White out (now 3-3 without him). Experimentation continued for Boston, starting double-big without a point guard, integrating Jaden Springer and Svi Mykhailiuk into the fourth quarter rotation and mostly playing Al Horford next to Kristaps Porzingis. All those factors played into the largest Boston collapse since 1996, when the league began tracking largest leads.
No reason for the meltdown loomed larger than the Celtics, again, slowing down late and losing, 120-118, due to running out of time. They nearly did the same last Wednesday against Milwaukee and squandered a 22-point lead in the fourth alone at Cleveland earlier this month.
Atlanta held the ball with a one-point advantage and the clock in their hands. Brown and Boston had just squandered the entirety of the shot clock on the previous possession before tossing up a long jump shot. Tatum got into his set too late two plays earlier, losing the ball and watching it fly in the other direction for a go-ahead Bogdan Bogdanovic three. Then, Dejounte Murray missed a mid-ranger, but Clint Capela grabbed the offensive board, kicked to De’Andre Hunter and the Hawks forward launched and buried a three.
A mistake strategically, not holding the ball with no shot clock, worked. Atlanta led by four with 10 seconds remaining.
“It’s a good lesson,” Joe Mazzulla said. “When you let a team hang around, they made those margin plays. Points off turnovers. Three-pointers. Offensive rebounds … there’s been 58, at least, times a 20-point lead has either been tied or the other team has taken a lead. So stuff like that’s gonna happen. We have to learn how to manage it, continue to learn how to manage it, we do, at managing runs, beginning of quarter, end of quarter.”
Teams don’t blow 30-point leads. None had this year, and the last collapse happened during the 2022 season. The Celtics won 130 straight when they crossed that threshold over the last 30 years. The Hawks, effectively locked into the 10th seed, but searching for momentum before the play-in tournament, hoped Vit Krejci, Garrison Mathews, Bruno Fernando and other depth players could simply keep up with Boston’s stars. That they overtook them in such dramatic fashion negated some of the excuses the short-handed and experimenting Celtics could lean on.
The Hawks provided little to no defensive resistance against the Celtics’ big bodies early. That made it all the more shocking when, after getting back on their feet with an 8-0 run after nearly squandering that entire lead in the third, Boston watched Krejci run in transition for an 8-0 run of his own.
Pushing the pace late in the fourth and finding the basket when threes stopped falling allowed the Celtics to re-take a lead on a Tatum driving dunk. Brown and Tatum hit mid-rangers to maintain that advantage. The squandered advantage lowered the margin for error.
“We know,” Porzingis said, describing the locker room. “There’s not too much to say. We can all say, we lost it in the end of the second quarter. Somebody could say it, but we all know it anyway. That’s when we started to loosen up a little bit and it carried on into the third. I think we did start turning it up as the game was getting closer, but still, they’re a talented team and they just made shots, got some transition, got us turning the ball over a little bit and ran away with it.”
The rare absence of both point guards and often shedding the position entirely to play bigger played a part. The Hawks also flipped three-point shooting dramatically in the second half, starting 9-for-15 from three while the Celtics went on a 1-for-12 drought from deep, sparking a 37-10 earthquake that pulled Atlanta from down 30 to within three in under nine minutes between halves. Capela and Hunter started the run before halftime by putting pressure on the rim, then Bogdanovic hit a three and Murray cut to the rim to end the second quarter on a 9-0 run to within 18. The type of swing Mazzulla constantly rails against.
Krejci and Murray stepped into open transition threes to spark a 13-0 run into the third. Payton Pritchard answered, shooting 5-for-7 in the third to propel Boston ahead, 96-90, into the fourth. Atlanta answered, 7-0, and crunch time became inevitable. An area the Celtics have improved in this year.
The later, and closer, the game gets, the more they’ve struggled to maintain their offense, pace and poise. Monday’s loss dropped Boston to 4-7 in games played within one point in the final minutes and 12-11 in one-possession games in the final two minutes.
Mazzulla deemed it a trend around the league. You need to make shots, he said, to win in the clutch.
“I feel like we had some good looks,” Brown said. “I just feel like we didn’t get a stop. I didn’t love the last shot that we got. I think we waited too late, I was waiting for the action to develop, but the clock was winding down, we were taking too much time and I didn’t really like the shot that I got on the right wing, but other than that, I feel like we got some good looks outside of some of the turnovers that we had. That’s something we’ll continue to work on.”
