The Celtics were long shots to beat the Magic on Wednesday night even before opening tip. The visitors sat out their top six players for the matchup, which was meaningless for the standings on the tail end of a back-to-back. The Magic, on the other hand, were playing to lock in the No. 7 seed for the play-in tournament.
With just Boston’s JV squad available coming off the long trip from New York Tuesday night, the Celtics suffered through their worst offensive night of the year, mustering just 76 points in the 20-point defeat.
Joe Mazzulla fielded about three minutes of questions about the woefully undermanned Celtics following the defeat but he couldn’t help but get blunt when constantly questioned about the team’s struggles.
“I appreciate everyone’s creativity in the type of questions that they’re asking,” Mazzulla told reporters via NBC Sports Boston. “But we got to the hotel at 4:30 in the morning. That was really fun what you guys did there. But what are we doing?”
The openness was a rare moment of candidness about his own team’s performance in a press conference this year in what amounted to a scheduled loss. The Celtics had a similarly brutal back-to-back last month when they faced the Brooklyn Nets less than 24 hours after beat the Miami Heat. That victory did not come easy despite Boston nearly being at full strength for the matchup.
This time around, Payton Pritchard and Sam Hauser were leading the charge against one of the NBA’s defenses coming off an overtime matchup. Boston struggled to create offense all night with the team misfiring regularly from 3-point range (7-of-40) and piling up 16 turnovers.
Pritchard had a team-high 15 points in the defeat over his 35 minutes in his second start of the season.
“Unfortunately, we didn’t really hit too many of our good looks from three which obviously hurts, especially in the modern NBA,” Pritchard told reporters in Orlando. ‘‘Sleep plays a part in fatigue. You get in at 4:30 a.m., so it’s not easy but it’s also not an excuse. So you have to find ways to win. That is the disappointing part of it, you learn from it, you grow from it and you move on.”
The Celtics won’t be playing for anything in the final two games of their regular season at TD Garden but it’s likely we will see some starters back in the fold starting on Friday night.
