Unless something radically changes, even in a shortened season, this could be a long winter for the Celtics.
For long stretches last night against the Dallas Mavericks, the Celtics looked like they were the team playing back-to-back games, not the one coming off a four-day respite. They looked old, slow and allergic to paint.
Although they rallied to tie the game with 25 seconds to play on a 28-foot 3-pointer by Paul Pierce, they were spent, and soon enough they were beaten when Dirk Nowitzki eviscerated Kevin Garnett, who tried to get in the reigning Finals MVP's face. In a flash, Dirk blew past KG and scored the winning basket without much resistance from Brandon Bass, who fouled him, but not the way Brad Marchand would have.
The result was a 90-85 loss to the defending champions in which the proud but aging Celtics seemed out of sync and out of sorts for much of the night. The most telling statistic, both for this game and perhaps for this season, was 17-0.
That's how many second chance points the Mavericks got and how many the Celtics didn't get. You can look at that a lot of ways, but one is that second-chance points are about desire, quickness and, quite often, the ability to assert yourself, especially in the paint where Dallas outscored the Celts, 44-30.
"That energy is the challenging part of the game that we have to improve on," Ray Allen said.
What made that 17-0 disparity seem like an ill-wind warning about what might be coming was that the Mavericks were last in the league in second-chance points — until last night when the Celtics gave them more second chances than Father Flanagan.
"You can't win," Celtics coach Doc Rivers conceded when those numbers were mentioned. "It's very difficult."
Unfailingly upbeat, Rivers reminded anyone who would listen that it's early and that being 4-5 does not mean the season is lost. It does, however, mean something has to change, a point he willingly conceded.
The question is can aging warriors like Garnett and Jermaine O'Neal, who have fewer and fewer arrows in their quivers and many battle scars, change all that much? Certainly it is alarming when someone like Brendan Haywood has 11 boards in 29 minutes and O'Neal has three in 22.
Rivers spoke to the problem in a sense when he conceded that the team no longer belongs to the Big Three because, well, they're not as big as they used to be. At least not at the moment.
When asked if he felt Rajon Rondo had shouldered too much of the offensive responsibility against Dallas (8-of-16 from the field, 8-of-12 from the line, game-high 24 points), Rivers shook his head in the negative.
"I think this is his team right now, until everybody else gets it going," Rivers said, words that never would have come out of his mouth a year or two ago when the Big Three really was. "We need him to be aggressive. We need him to be a scorer and attack.
"That's a change, but that's what it is right now until everybody else gets it going because they are not."
He was speaking specifically of Garnett, who suddenly looks aged not old, and Paul Pierce, whose injury problems began before the season did. But Rivers could have added O'Neal as well, and if that remains the case, Danny Ainge's worst nightmare could unfold in front of him — a replay of the painful demise of the original (and only, really) Big Three of Larry Bird, Kevin McHale and Robert Parish.
Ainge swore he would not see that scenario play itself out again, and perhaps it still won't, but last night as the three of them went a combined 9-of-24 from the floor, there was an unsettled feeling in the pit of your stomach that this is a passion play without a happy ending.
Certainly the arrival of Mickael Pietrus added an upbeat note as he played quality defensive minutes, hit his first 3-pointer and promised he was here "to fight for my teammates, to fight for my coaches."
Hopefully that will be the case and, at his best, he brings both a strong defensive presence and an ability to knock down treys from the wing. But when he hit that first shot, the prolonged ovation from the Garden crowd seemed desperate.
It's early, of course and as Rivers kept saying, his team's best players simply need to get going to take the load off Rondo. What was left unanswered was the larger question that seemed to surface as the Mavericks were taking control of the paint.
What if they don't?
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