Celtics 
The Celtics’ Kristaps Porzingis is called for a foul as Toronto Raptors’ Davion Mitchell defends during the second half. Frank Gunn/The Canadian Press via AP
January 15, 2025
The Celtics struggled in the first half and fell apart entirely in the second, dropping a game 110-97 against a Raptors team that they beat by 50 the last time they met.
Here are the takeaways.
This stretch is quickly becoming more than a rut.
At first, Boston’s struggles over the last month could be explained by poor 3-point shooting. After all, the not-so-secret of the modern NBA is that games are often won or lost at the 3-point line.
But you can’t blame the 3-point line for the Celtics’ struggles on Wednesday – while they weren’t impressive (16-for-46, 34.8 percent), they were better than the Raptors (11-for-34, 32.4 percent).
Maybe you could say the Celtics’ odd December schedule killed their momentum, but every team has scheduling quirks, and the Celtics made it through the toughest part of their schedule relatively unscathed when they went 3-1 on their recent road trip out west.
No, at this point, the blame for the Celtics’ struggles can be sprinkled all over the roster, and Wednesday’s game was just the latest – albeit perhaps the most pronounced – example of a team for whom the most optimistic possibility is that they don’t particularly care right now.
The Celtics’ defense broke down repeatedly against the Raptors, who hurt their pursuit of a badly needed Cooper Flagg with the win. At one point in the second half, the Raptors were shooting a staggering 77 percent from the field, and while they finished 50.6 percent overall, that total includes a cold streak at the end of the fourth quarter that offered the Celtics’ sputtering offense every opportunity to get back into the game.
The defensive struggles killed any semblance of momentum. In a stretch that felt oddly decisive with 7:41 remaining, the Celtics finally created a little offense when Jrue Holiday ran a pick-and-roll with Kristaps Porzingis that generated an easy lob slam, but on the other end, Jaylen Brown got completely lost on a guard-to-guard pick-and-roll early in the shot clock, and Jamal Shead buried a 3-pointer that pushed the lead to 14. At that stage, the Celtics had plenty of time to come back from a 14-point deficit, but they had produced precious few reasons in the preceding 40 minutes to believe they would pull it off.
The offense, which so often flows out of the defense, was similarly lackluster and uninspired. Payton Pritchard was the team’s leading scorer with 20 points, but he was far from blameless – he launched multiple 3-pointers from the Raptors logo, including one immediately after Shead’s 3-pointer, even though he has been out of the rhythm that justifies those types of shots for weeks.
Jaylen Brown shot 4-for-14 and took a few flow-killing offensive possessions that did the Celtics no favors. Brown has shown so many advancements in his game over the course of the last 12 months (and really, over the last seven years), but seeing him revert to some of his worst habits has been less than encouraging.
Jayson Tatum started the season as a fairly legitimate MVP candidate but has put together entirely too many poor shooting performances like Wednesday’s to be high on anyone’s ladder right now, and failing to take a shot in the fourth quarter like he did against the Raptors is a tough look.
It’s not entirely clear what’s going on with Derrick White, but the Celtics need far more than a 2-for-9 shooting night (1-for-7 from three) in which he was -29 in just 21:15 from a player who was a serious contender for an All-Star slot a month ago.
You could blame the offensive scheme, which left Brian Scalabrine pleading for a player in the dunker’s spot on the NBC Sports Boston broadcast.
You could blame the free throws – the Celtics were 9-for-18 at the line, which doesn’t entirely make up the difference in the loss but could have changed the vibe of the game in the fourth quarter enough to make a material difference to a team that so clearly appears to be struggling with its general vibe.
You probably can’t blame Kristaps Porzingis – one of the Celtics’ few bright spots offensively at 7-for-11 from the field and 4-for-5 from three – but you can reasonably raise an eyebrow at the on/off stats that show the Celtics perform 11.6 points per 100 possessions worse when he’s on the floor vs. off in the 454 minutes he has played so far this season (a number that will go down after Wednesday’s -17 performance). Not all of that blame can be laid at Porzingis’ feet – he’s not responsible for the 3-point shooting struggles of his teammates, and the starters’ struggles as a whole are one of the most confounding elements of the season so far. Still, the numbers are what they are, and they aren’t friendly at the moment.
“It’s one of those nights,” NBC Sports Boston play-by-play broadcaster Drew Carter mused as yet another jumper clanked off the rim in the fourth quarter, but the truth is the Celtics have had a lot of “those nights” recently – far more than can reasonably be explained by a simple shooting rut. The Celtics are struggling in ways that feel unfamiliar to anyone who watched them overcome their demons and march to a title last year but simultaneously familiar to anyone who watched them develop those demons in the first place.
The non-Tatum minutes were bad.
As previously noted, Tatum wasn’t particularly impressive on Wednesday – he pulled down 10 rebounds and dished out seven assists, but he was 5-for-15 from the floor and 3-for-9 from three. The overall field goals are particularly concerning since 1) Tatum should be making more shots and 2) Tatum should probably be taking more shots.
But maybe more concerning for the Celtics is how the minutes without Tatum have gone recently. On Wednesday, Tatum was -1 in a game the Celtics lost by 13. Every other starter posted a double-digit plus/minus.
The Raptors ran out to a 15-5 lead before the Celtics actually put together a good stretch of basketball – they ended the first quarter on a 24-10 run, taking a 29-25 lead into the second that appeared to restore some order to the proceedings.
Tatum, however, doesn’t play much in the second quarter, and while the Celtics broke even in the 5:35 that he played, they lost the quarter by six and trailed at halftime.
The Raptors crushed the Celtics in two key areas.
How do the Celtics lose to a tanking team when they outshoot them from three, and when no player on that tanking team gets particularly hot from the field? For one thing, they lost the points in the paint 60-40. For another, they were also outscored in transition 18-5. The Celtics aren’t one of the NBA’s pacier teams (they are 24th after Wednesday’s action), but they weren’t in any particular hurry at all against the Raptors.
The Raptors snapped a lengthy losing streak.
The Celtics hadn’t lost to the Raptors since March 28 of 2022. In other words, the Celtics’ loss on Wednesday – which was Joe Mazzulla’s first to the Raptors since he took over the team – came more than 1,000 days after the last one.
Three games in four nights (four times).
The Celtics just embarked on a bizarre part of their schedule that features four different three-games-in-four-nights stretches, if you look at the schedule the right way.
The first tipped off with Wednesday’s loss, as games against the Magic and Hawks on Friday and Saturday loom.
The second starts with the Magic game, since the Warriors will be in town on Monday – in other words, the Magic-Hawks-Warriors stretch creates a second.
The Warriors game is the start of a third, as the Celtics travel to Los Angeles (as things stand right now) for games against the Clippers and Warriors on the 22nd and 23rd.
Then the Clippers are the start of a final 3-in-4, which culminates with a Finals rematch against the Mavericks on Jan. 25.
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