The Boston Celtics have lacked a lot of things this season, most notably wins.
Among the many reasons for their relatively lackluster season has been a lack of toughness, both mental and physical. However, the Celtics had both in spades Tuesday night when they beat the brakes off the vaunted Golden State Warriors en route to a 128-95 win.
The mental toughness was obvious. Going into Oracle Area with negativity swirling around the team and coming away with a win seemed like a near-impossible task. But Boston was able to dig down and find a way to play its best game of the season.
But the Celtics also showed some physical fight for one of the first times all season. Noted hothead DeMarcus Cousins, perhaps with frustration boiling over, took exception to physical play from Celtics big man Aron Baynes in the fourth quarter. After Baynes was spilled to the floor, Cousins looked over him and taunted him.
That wasn’t going to fly with Baynes’ teammates. Jayson Tatum, giving up 60 pounds to Cousins, “shoved” Cousins to get him out of Baynes’ face. That escalated the situation, and Cousins tried to go after Tatum. That’s when Terry Rozier, giving up 10 inches and 80 pounds himself to Cousins, stepped in and squared up with the Warriors big man. A fired-up Baynes eventually joined the fray, too.
A near-fight in the fourth quarter of a 30-point game alone won’t turn around the Celtics’ season. Because Rozier and Brown defended their teammate isn’t reason alone to say the Celtics are back in the NBA title hunt.
But from the Celtics’ standpoint, it’s an encouraging sign they’re still willing to fight for each other. A myriad of reports have suggested Boston isn’t very tight as a team, especially compared to recent iterations of the Green when incidents like these seemed to happen on a nightly basis.
The Celtics don’t need to fight every night to prove they have each others’ backs, but Tuesday’s incident does fall in line with some of the postgame comments from Boston.
“That long plane ride helped us out, I’ll just say that,” Kyrie Irving told reporters after the game. ” … We needed it. We were going to get to a point where we were just going to get tired of fighting each other, fighting the outside world (when) it doesn’t really matter. So we just wanted to come out here and play basketball. This is our sanctuary. We have to do everything to protect it and not let anyone infiltrate it.”
None of this will matter if the Celtics come out Wednesday night and fall flat on their faces again when they take on the Kings in Sacramento. But it’s a step in the right direction for a team that needed something to feel good about and had to prove it still had some fight left.
