Bob Cousy wants to see the team he loves so dearly succeed, so like most Celtics fans, he’s a little frustrated with how things are going recently for Boston.
The C’s blew yet another big second-half lead Thursday in New York before losing to the Knicks on a buzzer-beater. That was a fitting culmination to the Celtics vomiting away a 25-point lead against their longtime rivals.
The collapse was nothing new for these C’s, though, and it’s getting on Cousy’s nerves. The Celtics legend went off on the current team in an interview with The Boston Globe’s Dan Shaughnessy, lamenting the late-game problems that far too often have led to losses.
“There’s something wrong,” Cousy told Shaughnessy in a column published Friday in the Globe. “It’s just schoolyard. Run up and down and take the first shot that shows. There doesn’t seem to be intelligent direction. I think a stabilizing piece is missing. They usually (expletive) it up in the fourth quarter when you need to be paying attention to business.”
The problem, according to Cousy, is the lack of an effective and efficient point guard. That’s an unsurprising diagnosis from one of the best point guards in NBA history. We’ve seen similar critiques from old-timers before in every sport, as the basis for such criticism typically is rooted in a feeling that the old way was the best way.
But Cousy’s not wrong. There clearly is something wrong with this Celtics team, which has been borderline bad since losing the 2020 Eastern Conference Finals to the Miami Heat in the bubble. The Celtics have struggled to find a consistent, traditional point guard. Kyrie Irving fit the mold, but Cousy correctly labels him a “headcase,” and Kemba Walker was more of a shooting guard in Cousy’s eyes.
Cousy praised Jaylen Brown and Jayson Tatum for their skills, too, but they (and Marcus Smart) aren’t true point guards. When the tough gets going, the Celtics become an unorganized puddle.
“Right now, at crunch time in the fourth quarter,” he told Shaughnessy, “they’re giving it to Brown and Tatum to create for themselves and 70% of the time they do, but they don’t have the creating skills that a clever point guard would have, so they (expletive) it up.”
Again, hard to argue. The results speak for themselves. And that’s probably why Boston isn’t going anywhere until it’s fixed.
“They should be a lot better than they are,” Cousy said, per the Globe. “It doesn’t look like we’re going to be hanging banner No. 18 anytime soon.”
