Jaylen Brown, Celtics go cold, fall apart in ugly loss to Hawks

Boston Celtics

Brown and Payton Pritchard were miserable on a night when the defense just wasn’t good enough.

The Celtics fell behind early and couldn’t pull themselves back into Wednesday’s game, falling to the Hawks 117-106 in an ugly loss. 

Here are the takeaways.

A ‘bad day at the office’

At the 9:56 mark in the first quarter, the Celtics surrendered the lead — although no one knew it yet — for the last time, falling behind 7-5 on a 3-pointer by Corey Kispert.

Over the next seven minutes, the Hawks got blazing hot, and the Celtics went icy cold, and the result was a 25-6 run that pushed Atlanta’s lead to 32-11. A pair of 3-pointers by Anfernee Simons trimmed the deficit a bit, but the Hawks pushed it back to 20 by the end of the quarter, and the Celtics never really challenged again

“I don’t think we played to our standard tonight,” Jaylen Brown said afterward. 

Or, as Joe Mazzulla put it: “You just shut it off. Just one of those nights,” adding that it was “just a bad day at the office.”

Still, in the interest of explaining that bad day at the office, the Celtics were beaten badly in two crucial facets of the game. 

First, the Hawks were 18-for-42 (42.9 percent) from three, while the Celtics were 9-for-34 (26.5 percent), which meant the Hawks scored 27 more points from deep. Brown was 0-for-5, Payton Pritchard was 0-for-3, Derrick White was 1-for-5, and Sam Hauser was 2-for-6. Simons was 2-for-4 and made both of his shots in the third quarter, but he was mysteriously absent for the entire fourth.

Second, the Celtics turned the ball over 16 times, while the Hawks turned it over nine times. Luka Garza was particularly turnover prone — four turnovers in 23 minutes as a big man is a tough look — but he wasn’t alone. 

If the Celtics don’t make threes and they cough the ball up 16 times, they are very unlikely to win. They are now 6-6 in their last 12, and a team that was previously exceptional at taking care of business against inferior teams is now showing signs of wear during the most grueling part of their schedule.

“You don’t want to make excuses,” Pritchard said. “You’ve got to bring it. It’s your job. But it can be tough if you’re playing every other night and it’s a hard part of the season. 

“But if you want to separate yourself, this is where you’ve got to dig deep.”

Joe Mazzulla picked up a technical (and nearly leveled Sam Cassell).

Late in the third quarter, as the Celtics made one of several attempts at a comeback that ultimately proved to be a false start, Onyeka Okongwu dispatched Jordan Walsh en route to an attempt at the rim. 

Okongwu wasn’t called for a foul, and an incensed Mazzulla leapt off the bench protesting that the Celtics had been whistled for a foul on a remarkably similar play one possession previously. Mazzulla quickly picked up a technical foul and appeared to be ready to pick up another one before Cassell got in his way. 

Mazzulla, however, kept trying to get closer to the official to make his point, and Cassell stumbled a bit, leading to the amusing visual of Cassell falling as he struggled to hold his head coach back from ejection. 

Mazzulla was asked after the game if he picked up the technical to rally his team. 

“Usually you don’t see the exact same situation happen within seconds, and the exact same situation happened, and it was handled differently,” Mazzulla said. “It was a little bit of both. I think it was a little bit to get your point across, a little bit to try and spark the team and whatnot. But you don’t usually see those exact same situations kind of happen right away.”

Plus/minus is a noisy stat …

… but Jaylen Brown was -24 and Payton Pritchard was -30 in a game the Celtics lost by 11. 

“The team feeds off of my energy as well, so being a leader, I got to be better,” Brown said. “Tonight I just didn’t have it.”

Jaylen Brown accidentally left Okongwu bloody.

Out of respect for the fact that it’s … incredibly gross, we’ll just include a link to what Okongwu’s mouth looked like after he took a nasty elbow directly to the face from Brown midway through the fourth quarter. Okongwu’s mouth sustained a lot of damage, and he will need a significant amount of dental work to get it all sorted out. 

Initially, Brown argued to the officials that he was going through a natural motion around Okongwu, and that appeared to be the case, but given the force with which Brown hit Okongwu and the height of his elbow, it was hard to argue against the flagrant foul that officials (belatedly) gave Brown, and impossible to argue with the offensive foul.

Okongwu went straight to the locker room, but he came jogging back out to take the flagrant free throw, which is when his broken mouth became visible on the broadcast. Brown could be seen checking on him before he shot the free throw.

“Just being aggressive like I always am,” Brown said. “Just a basketball play. It’s unfortunate. Okongwu is a good player. I know from my own experiences with a fractured face and chipped teeth that s*** is a hassle. 

“It wasn’t intentional, and I know it’s going to be a long day at the dentist tomorrow, so hopefully he has a good recovery.”

Baylor Scheierman is strong.

In the third quarter, the Celtics went small and left the struggling Brown and Pritchard on the bench for an extended stint, during which they made up some important ground. 

One of the keys to that stretch was Baylor Scheierman, who scored five points in a 13-second stretch near the end of the period but also defended hard as one of the bigger players on the floor. Scheierman is strong — he can absorb a lot of contact, and when he wrestles an opponent for the ball, he often wins. 

That strength is important for Scheierman’s future — at his size, the ability to guard multiple positions is crucial, and he’s strong enough to body up while being relatively mobile against smaller defenders. 

Mazzulla thought Scheierman’s lineup played well defensively and helped the Celtics get within 11 but “on the offensive end, we weren’t generating great advantages.”

“So it’s really just get back — Payton, Jaylen coming back into the game — let’s get back to some of our play calls there and be able to execute,” Mazzulla said. “But that group did a good job trying to get us back into it.”

Scheierman was also robbed of what probably should have been a flagrant foul — Okongwu wrapped him up in transition around the shoulders and dragged him to the ground at a key juncture, which would have given the Celtics two shots and the ball. Instead, after reviewing the play, the officials called it a common foul, and Scheierman made one of his two free throws. 

The Celtics missed Neemias Queta.

After performing well in his debut, Amari Williams got another start on Wednesday with Neemias Queta sidelined due to an illness, but Williams turned the ball over twice and didn’t look up to the task against a frontcourt like the Hawks. He was pulled for Luka Garza at the 7:24 mark, and he didn’t return until the Celtics waved the white flag in the fourth quarter. 

The degree to which the Celtics rely on Queta is concerning and presumably not lost on Mazzulla and Brad Stevens. The trade deadline is just over a week away, and while Garza’s high-effort performance has been both admirable and helpful, if this team hopes to make a deep playoff push, acquiring another big man feels like a necessity, not a luxury.

What’s next

The Celtics will look to get back on track against the Kings on Friday before wrapping up their homestand against the Bucks on Sunday. 

After that, they have a tough Texas swing for a team already feeling the weight of their schedule: A back-to-back on Tuesday and Wednesday against the Mavericks and Rockets respectively.