The Boston Celtics didn’t play a full four quarters of basketball and it cost them their 11-game winning streak during a shocking fourth-quarter collapse against the Cleveland Cavaliers on Wednesday night.
With a 22-point and nine minutes left in the final frame, Boston crumbled and allowed Cleveland, specifically forward Dean Wade, to claw back. The Cavaliers held the Celtics to 8-of-25 shooting, including 0-of-8 from three, to flip the script before the final buzzer with a 105-104 win.
Looking ahead, still with sole possession of the best record in the NBA (48-13), the Celtics are still fine. However, Shaquille O’Neal still felt the need to offer Boston some words of advice with the regular season quickly wrapping up.
“We’re still in first place, we learn from this, we’re upset tonight but there’s more games. We just gotta continue to keep this No. 1 spot and realize these are things that can possibly send us home early (in the playoffs),” O’Neal explained on Tuesday night’s TNT postgame coverage. “So you focus on it, you go back and you practice on it, and I agree with Jamal (Crawford). Stick with the system, don’t try to go hero ball.”
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O’Neal added: “If you’re 0-for-8 shooting threes, be like (Kevin Durant), get to the mid-range game. Do something else. Mix it up.”
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Wade, an undrafted Cavaliers signee from 2019, had only scored 20-plus points in one other instance this season — on Dec. 21. So to watch the 27-year-old drop 20 points in the fourth quarter alone was A) shocking and B) likely took Celtics head coach Joe Mazzulla and the rest of Boston’s staff by surprise, especially with Cleveland not having a healthy Donovan Mitchell available.
“He was not on the scouting report, I guarantee you,” O’Neal said, per TNT.
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Hard to disagree with O’Neal’s assumption.
Jaylen Brown, who finished with 21 points, but didn’t take a single shot attempt in the fourth quarter, wasn’t content by any means.
“That’s what happens when you don’t match the gas and take the little things for granted throughout the game, and you let a team stick around, and they still NBA players and tip your cap,” Brown told reporters, per CLNS Media. “Dean Wade, he got hot. We wasn’t expecting or accounting for that, but we still should’ve won this game.”
Entering the night, Boston had lost just once through the previous 60 games when leading by 10-plus points at halftime. The loss was more reflective of everything the Celtics failed to do rather than Wade’s once-in-a-blue hot-hand night. In the grand scheme of things, yes, the Celtics didn’t lose any significant ground regarding their standing in the Eastern Conference, however, the loss does remind the team of its vulnerabilities that can always come into play.
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Featured image via Ken Blaze/USA TODAY Sports Images
