‘We didn’t have fun’: Should Celtics be worried after back-to-back joyless losses to Warriors, Clippers?

The first 25 games of the Celtics‘ season produced some of the best basketball Bostonians have seen in recent memory — perhaps since the lofty 1986 season, the apex of the Larry Bird era.

An ambitious comparison? Of course. But the first two months of the 2022-23 Celtics have been a fever dream of ball movement, 3-point shooting, and blowout wins over good teams. The topper might have been last week’s win over the Suns, which was an unnaturally easy victory over a team with championship aspirations.

But fevers eventually break. On Monday, the Clippers threw a haymaker — their best performance of the season, which came on the heels of a haymaker from the Warriors. The Celtics absorbed both blows and dropped to 21-7 in a pair of losses.

Grant Williams offered his analysis after Monday’s loss. If it raises your eyebrows a little bit, well … you probably watched last year’s team closely.

“It kind of reminded me a little bit of last year,” Williams said. “We got a little stagnant. We didn’t do our job in offense of making everybody else around us better, and that’s something we’ve seen over the last two games. We have to get back to who we are, playing the way we want to play and having fun out there.”

“Tonight, we kind of let things snowball,” Jaylen Brown added.

The Celtics have done a lot of work to exorcise everything that happened last season, and the progress is one of the reasons for their early success. Games don’t get away from them often. Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown are less likely to try to do everything themselves. The ball whips around the floor with a purpose, finding shooters and easy baskets. Ball-handlers aren’t as likely to get stripped. Players don’t seem to get as bogged down by perceived officiating slights (with the exception of Williams). The depth issues from last year have been almost entirely reversed — the Celtics’ bench units have been some of their most deadly.

Still, sometimes last season pokes its nose into this one. How worried should Celtics fans be after it surfaced again over the weekend?

At this stage, not very — for a few reasons.

First, remember that the Celtics are currently wrapping up a truly brutal road trip. When teams go on West Coast road trips, they are generally limited to just West Coast games. For whatever reason, the NBA’s schedule-makers handed the Celtics games against the Nets and Raptors on the road before they made their way west, which meant by the time they reached the Warriors, they were on their fourth game. Many trips west are four games long. The Celtics still had two games remaining … after losing an emotional rematch against the team that knocked them out of the Finals last season.

But the Celtics haven’t complained about the schedule, so let’s set that aside for now. Another thing to remember is that the Celtics have been without their starting centers — Al Horford and Robert Williams both sat out against the Warriors and Clippers. Prior to the season, center depth was the Celtics’ biggest concern from a roster-building perspective. Blake Griffin has done his best — and his best has been unquestionably solid! — but the gap between Griffin and Horford is cavernous.

Here’s an example: Early in the third quarter, the Celtics generated the type of look that boosted them to their gaudy 21-5 record with a really nice offensive set. Brown and Derrick White both went to the top of the key, and Brown set a screen for Marcus Smart, which coaxed Kawhi Leonard onto Smart. The pick-and-pop effectively removed Smart’s defender (Reggie Jackson) from the play, which sprang White free. Smart found White, who made a beautiful short-roll pass to the corner.

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The recipient normally would have been Al Horford, who is shooting 46.6 percent from 3 on 4.4 attempts per game. Instead, it was Griffin, who has taken 18 3-pointers all year.

“Al’s very, very important to this team,” Tatum told reporters. “Obviously we’d much rather have him than not, but we’ve just gotta have a next man up mentality and figure out a way to win until we’re at full strength.”

That’s a great mentality to have, but it understates Horford’s impact (and the center depth behind him). Everything Tatum does is made easier by having Horford as part of the Celtics’ five-out offense, and when life is easy for Tatum, life is easy for the Celtics.

When life is difficult for Tatum, he ends up making plays like this.

Tatum beat his initial defender, but three more defenders waited for him in the paint, and Leonard watched him too. Meanwhile, Griffin set a back screen for Brown, which would have removed Leonard from the play if Tatum could get him the ball. Getting Brown the ball might have jump-started the type of action that makes the Celtics great too — a pass to Brown stresses the defense. A swing to Smart would have further stressed it. That’s how the Celtics have operated all year — stress the defense until it cracks and you get a wide open basket.

“If we get downhill, we’ve done our job,” Williams said. “We’ve put pressure on the defense. We’ve done our job to make sure the defense collapses. Now we just have to make the right decision on who we want to pass the ball to after. …

“I think that’s what we have to get back to on the offensive end, because we’re doing our job of making sure we create that advantage, but we’ve been forcing a bit.”

So yes — to Williams’ point, the Celtics’ offense showed some parallels to last year’s group against the Warriors and Clippers. But the Celtics had 26 regular-season games prior to this two-game slide that should be considered too, not to mention the run that lifted them from 23-24 to the No. 2 seed last year.

“Like I said, I think of these two [losses] as outliers,” Williams said. “For us, it’s just a matter of not making it a trend.”

Or, as Tatum put it: The Celtics need to have fun again.

“It wasn’t fun in Golden State. It wasn’t fun tonight,” he said. “Just the way we was playing, right? We’re going to lose some games, but we’ve just got to have fun.

“This is basketball. We get paid a lot of money and we shouldn’t be that tense. It’s not the Finals, it’s not the playoffs. It’s December 12th. This s— won’t matter in four months, but we’ve got to have fun along the way.”

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The post ‘We didn’t have fun’: Should Celtics be worried after back-to-back joyless losses to Warriors, Clippers? appeared first on Boston.com.