SAN FRANCISCO — Whatever the Boston Celtics experience this season in their bid to repeat as champions, Steve Kerr has probably gone through it. While winning a combined nine championships as a player and coach, he has ridden all of the highs. He has grinded through all of the lows. He has witnessed the burden on superstars like Michael Jordan and Stephen Curry. He understands as well as anyone the toll an entire championship team must pay in an attempt to take home a second consecutive title.
As badly as Boston has played over parts of December and January, Kerr downplayed any concern.
“I wouldn’t worry about the Celtics if I were one of their fans,” Kerr said. “This is normal.”
The Celtics built a first-half lead on the back of their defense Monday before running away from the Golden State Warriors for a 125-85 win. It was less than two hours before tipoff when Kerr provided his perspective on his opponent’s recent slippage.
“We always say at the beginning of the season we’re climbing Everest,” Kerr said. “It’s when you start training camp, it’s like you’re at base camp. And the NBA season is such a long haul, if you go to the finals it’s over 100 games. So if you go to the finals and come back the next year, you’re right back at base camp. And that’s intimidating, especially for the Celtics. They’ve been at it for seven or eight years, playing deep into the postseason and it’s not like this was a brand new team last year winning at all. They’ve had to fight through a lot of difficult seasons so perfectly natural for them to have a little bit of an emotional hangover and maybe not be at their best game after game. I’ve seen that a million times in this league.”
The Celtics didn’t look emotionally hungover Monday afternoon. They opened a 15-point halftime lead despite missing outside shots throughout the first half, then buried the Warriors with a sharp third quarter. Boston’s starting lineup, which has struggled mightily at times over the last month, put together its second straight promising outing. After entering the third quarter with a 54-39 lead, the Celtics first unit outscored the Warriors 25-10 over the first 6:05 of the second half.
According to Jayson Tatum, Joe Mazzulla told the Celtics at halftime their physicality dominated the game. Following the game, Mazzulla said his team picked up its physicality after Curry stole a pass intended for Jaylen Brown on the second possession of the first quarter. During the decisive third-quarter run, they repeatedly targeted Curry with early post-ups. Kristaps Porziņģis converted an and-1 over Curry. Brown posted up Curry hard enough to draw a double-team, then found Tatum across the court for a layup. Brown even picked up an offensive foul while trying to secure a post-up position right under the basket. The whistle didn’t deter him. On the next Boston possession, Brown bodied Dennis Schröder in transition for a driving bucket.
Kristaps Porziņģis and Andrew Wiggins battle for position on a rebound. (Cary Edmondson / Imagn Images)
“I thought the (second) play of the game Curry deflected a pass, and I thought we made a conscious effort to be more physical in our post attacks, whether it was Curry, (Buddy) Hield and even (Moses) Moody at times,” Mazzulla said. “I thought that compromised their defense a little bit and we were able to take advantage of that. So I think the physicality of our deep post catches against their smalls was impactful and we found different ways to get to that, whether it was JB, whether it was JT, whether it was KP. But I thought JB did a good job of kind of setting the tone from that physicality standpoint.”
The Celtics looked like themselves. They haven’t always done that lately while going 9-8 over their last 17 games. Throughout this stretch, Mazzulla has stressed they need to rebuild parts of the championship foundation. Despite some of the recent inconsistency, Tatum said the Celtics haven’t lost track of that process. Earlier in his career, he said he was burned by “trying to rush to the end (of the season) and (skipping) steps.”
“And it resulted in us losing in the conference finals,” Tatum said. “Whereas last year we didn’t get bored, we didn’t skip steps. We just tried to get a little bit better every day and we know the result of that. So keeping that in perspective and just understanding it’s hard. It’s hard to win night in and night out in the league. I don’t think it’s a question of, like, are we bored or not. It’s tough. We get everybody’s best shot. We put a lot of work in and sometimes we don’t play as well as we would like to. And that can be frustrating sometimes. But I wouldn’t say we’re bored or anything.”
Brown echoed a similar sentiment. He said the Celtics’ journey to get back to their usual standard “has been great.”
“You’ve got to love it because it’s hard to win in this league,” Brown said. “You can’t take it for granted and I think you have to fight for it. It hasn’t been as easy as we would’ve liked, and I think that’s good for us. It just shows you how hard it is. Night to night you can’t take winning for granted. You can’t skip steps. Us losing has been reminders of that, that this is what it takes each and every night to be that, so we’ve got to get that back and build on it.”
Mazzulla said he has seen recent signs of a bounce back for the Celtics — and not just in their blowout victory against Golden State. Even during a frustrating loss against Atlanta, which featured some bad crunch-time mistakes, Mazzulla thought his team had one of its best defensive performances ever against the Hawks.
“And so I think when you’re not getting the result you want, and sometimes when you are, you have to fight for what’s the right process,” Mazzulla said. “So I’ve liked a lot of the things we’ve been doing on both sides of the ball and you’ve just got to fight for process vs. results as far as that. And I think the consistency of that could lead to further success. So we saw that for the most part (against Golden State) as well.”
“They’ve still got guys in their primes, well-oiled machine, well-coached,” Warriors coach Steve Kerr said about the Celtics. “They know who they are.” (Ezra Shaw / Getty Images)
Kerr has seen a path like the Celtics have experienced many times before. He likely could have done without the thumping on Monday, but thinks they will come out of their challenging stretch just fine.
“What I would expect is come playoff time though, they’ll be ready to roll,” Kerr said. “They’ve still got guys in their primes, well-oiled machine, well-coached. They know who they are.”
(Top photo of Jrue Holiday dribbling past Stephen Curry: Cary Edmondson / Imagn Images)
Jay King is a staff writer for The Athletic covering the Boston Celtics. He previously covered the team for MassLive for five years. He also co-hosts the “Anything Is Poddable” podcast. Follow Jay on Twitter @byjayking
