The Boston Celtics have been pouring in points at a pretty impressive rate lately. On Wednesday, though, the Celtics’ normally stout defense didn’t hold up its end of the bargain.
The Celtics dropped 109 points at Air Canada Centre against the Toronto Raptors, marking the sixth consecutive game they’ve reached the century mark on offense. That number usually translates to success for Boston: Of the 15 games the C’s have scored 109 or more points this season, they’ve lost just five, and two of those defeats came in overtime.
Unfortunately for Boston, three of those losses have come in the team’s last six games.
The Celtics’ latest high-scoring defeat was caused in large part by Raptors guard DeMar DeRozan, who went off for a game-high 34 points in Toronto’s 115-109 win. DeRozan scored 18 of those in the third quarter as part of the Raptors’ 40-point outburst; in the first and third quarters alone, Toronto tallied 75 points on an incredible 31 of 45 shooting.
“I think the story of (Wednesday night)Â is the first and third quarters,” head coach Brad Stevens said in a postgame interview aired on CSN New England. “Seventy-five points, I mean, that’s just — you can’t win that way against a good team.”
Outside DeRozan’s heroics, the Celtics especially had issues in the paint, where 35-year-old Luis Scola scored the majority of his 18 points and Jonas Valanciunas didn’t miss a single shot (9 for 9) while adding 19. Stevens in several instances employed a small lineup with one true big man and four guards or wings, but the Celtics coach dismissed his team’s occasional lack of size as a reason for its interior struggles.
“We weren’t small all the time when they were scoring in the paint,” Stevens said. “They just scored in the paint regardless. So, I don’t know that that was a small (lineup) or big (lineup) thing.”
No matter how you slice it, Boston’s latest poor defensive showing isn’t a good sign for a team that prides itself on getting stops at that end: Despite their recent slip-ups, the Celtics still own the NBA’s fourth-best defensive rating at 99.3.
Boston’s 50.6 percent shooting effort Wednesday obviously is a great sign, as the C’s need their offense clicking if they want to be a viable threat in the Eastern Conference. Yet defensive leader Jae Crowder is one of the many Celtics who knows where Boston’s bread is buttered.
“It’s been good to see the ball going in the hole for a lot of guys this road trip,” Crowder said after Wednesday’s loss, via The Boston Globe’s Adam Himmelsbach. “But we’ve got to get back to our defense.”
Thumbnail photo via Nick Turchiaro/USA TODAY Sports Images
