The higher-seeded and hosting Boston Celtics lost Game 1 of their Eastern Conference semifinal series against the New York Knicks on Monday night, 108–105. The Celtics led by 16 at halftime, and by 20 midway through the third quarter, and then spent the rest of the night barfing into their laps. Here is the funniest number from the night: 45. That is how many three-point attempts the Celtics missed in Game 1. No NBA team has ever missed that many threes in a single playoff game before.
Even at their best, the Celtics under coach Joe Mazzulla play offense with a kind of numbing actuarial bloodlessness: 3 > 2, forever and ever, and so they just keep huckin’ up those three-pointers—an appalling 54 percent of their field goal attempts were threes this season, seven points higher than any other team—and trust the math, supported by their outstanding defense, to sort itself out. Last season it did, and they won the Finals, and they might do it again this year. At their worst, though, this approach lapses into what looks like team-wide obsessive-compulsive disorder, as it did on Monday night, with the game steadily slipping away from Boston for the final 18 minutes of regulation and the overtime period and the blank-eyed Celtics just continually pumping up those threes, clang-clang-clang. They attempted 49 field goals in the second half and overtime, and 37 of them were threes, and 27 of those threes were misses. Their third-quarter shot chart looks like a cry for help:
The apocalyptic three-point shooting isn’t solely to blame for the loss, of course. One more defensive stop, a marginally better contest on, for example, either of the deeply insane step-back threes Jalen Brunson drained in Al Horford’s face in the final four minutes or so of regulation, and there never would have been an overtime period for Mikal Bridges to seal with a literal last-second steal of the ball away from Jaylen Brown. But it must be uniquely maddening to be a Celtics fan for one of these games—like the conference-final Game 7 they lost at home two springtimes ago to the Miami Heat—when this incredibly talented and versatile roster’s entire strategic and tactical framework collapses to Eventually regression to the mean will bail us out of this, if we change nothing at all.
Even as an unaffiliated viewer, it starts to make me feel insane. The house is burning down, and here’s perhaps the NBA’s most talented team, its defending champ, ritualistically locking and unlocking and locking the deadbolt on the front door, with growing desperation—This has always protected us in the past!—instead of just opening the fucking thing and walking outside. In this analogy, walking outside is, I dunno, sending Jayson Tatum down into the post? Maybe it wouldn’t work! Maybe there’s no reason to expect it would! But at least it would indicate that the Celtics were aware of what was happening around them, that they exist in Time, and it is moving, and the game’s result will be determined over the next short period of it and not by what happens when you simulate 10,000 contests between the two teams’ respective shooting tendencies and see who wins 50.1 percent of them.
I don’t think the Knicks did anything particularly smart or replicable—or really much of anything at all—to produce Boston’s historically putrid shooting, though there’s something to be said for the industry and opportunism required to take advantage of that shooting. Regression to the mean and basic math are both real things. The two of them might combine to beat the Knicks by 40 on Wednesday night, even if the Celtics themselves can’t be assed to do more than let them.