CLEVELAND — After a fourth quarter gone wrong, the Boston Celtics didn’t seem too broken up about their close loss to the Cleveland Cavaliers on Sunday night.
In the visitors’ locker room at Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse, a few players chomped on chicken wings. A couple of guys swapped jokes. Drew Peterson, after the most significant playing time of his career, cracked that he thought the coaching staff was actually calling for Jrue Holiday when telling him to check into the game to begin the second quarter.
“Every time I hear ‘Drew,’ I assume it’s Holiday,” Peterson said. “They were pointing at me.”
The defending champions don’t necessarily need to overreact to poor outcomes, even those that come in big games. They still recognized they let one slip away after taking a double-digit lead into the fourth quarter of their 115-111 loss to Cleveland.
“I thought they just made more plays than us down the stretch,” said coach Joe Mazzulla. “But I think it started with the end of the third (quarter), beginning of the fourth, where we kind of had some of those empty possessions, allowed them to hang around. And then when you get into a close game, it’s about who makes more plays.”
The Celtics could not stop Donovan Mitchell, who scored 20 of his 35 points in the fourth quarter. They could not hold onto a 14-point second-half lead. And, after falling behind by three points late in the fourth, they could not produce one potentially score-tying attempt over several tries during the final seconds.
Cleveland executed perfectly on its plan to foul Boston repeatedly so that Mazzulla’s team would not have a chance to tie the score down the stretch. Three times over the final 11.1 seconds, Cleveland fouled the Celtics before they could create a look from downtown. Boston trailed by three points each time because the Cavaliers continued to make their free throws at the other end.
The way Cleveland produced the final foul impressed the Celtics. After calling its final timeout with 5.7 seconds left, Boston was desperate to find a three-point look to tie the score. Mazzulla dialed up a play that started with all of Boston’s four non-inbounders behind the midcourt line. It looked like the Celtics might have been running a football-style set like the Pacers used against them in the Eastern Conference Finals.
Mazzulla said he wanted his players to create indecision for the defense and find a gap to produce a catch-and-shoot 3-point attempt. In that situation, Mazzulla said other teams have typically used man-to-man defense.
The Cavaliers lined up in a zone.
“That was the first time a team had kind of gone zone against it,” Mazzulla said.
The Celtics couldn’t find any opening against the Cavaliers’ zone defense. Payton Pritchard caught the inbounds pass from Holiday with nowhere to go. Evan Mobley, stationed in the corner, was able to foul Pritchard to prevent him from putting up a 3-point attempt.
“It was smart of them to (go zone),” said Kristaps Porziņģis, who finished with 21 points and eight rebounds. “We had some movement obviously to try to get an open look, which I think wasn’t there really. Payton made a play and we got fouled and that’s how it went. It was like adjustment against adjustment and they did a good job tonight honestly.”
Coach Kenny Atkinson suggested the Cavaliers would normally start fouling intentionally with a three-point lead under 10 seconds. They went to the strategy a little earlier against the Celtics.
“I think 10 seconds is kind of our thing,” Atkinson said. “But I was like screw that, we’re fouling. I don’t want to see Payton Pritchard come down and shoot a step-back 3. You just feel it.”
Because of the amount of fouls, the final 34 seconds of the game took more than 17 minutes of real time. The Celtics still had a chance after the final Cleveland foul. After sinking his first free throw, Pritchard intentionally missed the second perfectly off the front rim, but couldn’t execute the rest of the sequence well enough. In the rush to first fire the ball off the rim before the Cavaliers were prepared for a rebound, and then grab the rebound himself, he committed a lane violation.
“Man, that s— happened so fast,” Jayson Tatum said. “They called it. It was just unfortunate I guess.”
Even after squandering some of their 12-point fourth-quarter lead, the Celtics took a 97-92 advantage on a Tatum fadeaway jumper with less than four minutes left. Mitchell drained 3-pointers on the next three Cleveland possessions.
“He just found different ways to create space to get open looks,” Mazzulla said. “One of them was on a rotation on a catch-and-shoot. We helped up on one of his drives and gave Mobley a dunk. He got two isolation ones. So he just found ways to create space and to make plays there down the end.”
The Celtics almost delivered one of their best wins all season. With two starters missing — Jaylen Brown and Derrick White — Mazzulla needed to step outside of his usual game plan. Sam Hauser started for the first time this season. Peterson, a two-way contract wing who had played 30 minutes in his entire career, played the entire second quarter. The Celtics usually stagger Al Horford and Porziņģis on back-to-backs, so one of them plays in the first game and the other suits up for the second, but used both Sunday despite having another game Monday against the Miami Heat. Mazzulla said he wasn’t sure what that would mean for Porziņģis and Horford’s availability against the Heat.
Against the talented Cavaliers, who moved to 18-3 with the win, the short-handed roster almost did enough. After trailing by two points at halftime, the Celtics controlled the third quarter behind 17 points from Tatum in the frame. Peterson gave the Celtics 25 good minutes in by far the most extended playing time of his career. Mazzulla said he wanted to reward the second-year pro after he had some “really good reps lately” in non-game situations.
“I just thought he had some really good defensive possessions, defending without fouling,” Mazzulla said. “He’s physical. He’s smart. He has a knack for the ball whether it’s offensive rebounding or moving without the basketball to get open. And I think he works really hard. So you try to find moments throughout the season to where you can validate the work that the guys put in.”
Peterson said his teammates encouraged him to be aggressive with his touches.
“JT told me, ‘If you get any open shot, you better shoot it,’” Peterson said. “So I definitely learned quick. I learned last year in my first few games, you better not turn any open looks down. So I was just as aggressive as I could with the touches that I got and tried to do whatever I could out there.”
The Celtics didn’t do quite enough. Porziņģis pointed the finger at himself, saying he felt “a step slow tonight” offensively and defensively. He thought he needed to be in a better position and anticipate plays better, but said he felt good physically in his third game since returning from an ankle injury.
Despite some of the regrets, the Celtics didn’t seem to dwell on their loss. Before the season, Mazzulla said he would care more about the Celtics’ approach than their results over the early part of the schedule. They haven’t been perfect while going 16-4 over their first 20 games, but Mazzulla appreciates the way his team has carried itself.
“I think when you’re coming off the offseason that we’ve had, I really cared about the approach that we took to training camp, the approach that we took to practice and the approach that we’re taking,” Mazzulla said.
“I like where we’re at. I think we have an understanding of we’re playing some good basketball but we know we can be better. And I think that’s a healthy place to be in with 60 games left. We obviously know there’s stuff we have to work on but we’re kind of content with how it’s gone so far. So that is important to me. We haven’t had a bad practice yet. And I like the fact that we’re not peaking because there’s a lot of time and we’ve gotta be able to work through those things to be able to do that. It’s like a healthy (place).”
(Photo of Payton Pritchard being defended by Evan Mobley: David Richard / Imagn Images)
