In case you haven’t noticed, the Celtics’ season isn’t exactly off to the smoothest start.
Boston is 3-3 entering Sunday’s tilt against the Pistons. The C’s are coming off a tough loss to Detroit on Friday night in which they blew their 21-point second-half comeback in the final 80 seconds of the game. They’ve seen a couple of ugly losses to start the season, including the Christmas Day shellacking they took from the Brooklyn Nets.
But the team has seen its fair share of success, too. Jaylen Brown posted a career-high 42 points and became the first player in franchise history to score that many points in just three quarters Wednesday night.
Brown and Jayson Tatum have been gelling nicely, averaging a combined 51.8 points in the first six games and becoming the first Celtics duo to score 30-plus points apiece in a season opener, per Celtics Stats. But the pair have run into roadblocks of their own from time to time, too.
This is “exactly” what head coach Brad Stevens expected of the Celtics’ start to the season, per The Athletic’s Jay King. But while things have been “pretty predictable” so far, Stevens knows things will “continue to be challenging” down the stretch.
“This is what I anticipated,” Stevens told reporters during a video press conference Saturday, via the team. “We’ve got a lot of questions to answer. There’s a lot of new — a lot of people playing new roles, new responsibilities, new pressures that come with that.”
Marcus Smart offered a similar assessment following Friday’s loss.
“We didn’t expect it to be this bad, but we definitely expected to have some ups and downs,” Smart said. “A lot of curveballs thrown our way. A lot of learning curves. A lot of young guys. A lot of new guys. But it’s still not an excuse. A lot of the rest of us have been here for a longer period of time. We know the system. We know what Brad wants, and we have to go out there and do it.”
There’s still 66 games left on the Celtics’ regular-season schedule, so there’s plenty of time for the team to turn things around. Boston seems to have all the right pieces, it’s simply a matter of getting them to work together cohesively.
Do that, and this team can be dangerous.
