BOSTON — With the Celtics falling behind to the shorthanded Lakers on Thursday, unsurprisingly, there were some boos from the TD Garden crowd. The Lakers were without Anthony Davis and LeBron James, but the B-team squad drained 3-pointers all night.
But the C’s also weren’t playing with the right effort, and that was seen right from tipoff. The Celtics had nine turnovers in the first quarter, and while they had a brief lead in the second, the Lakers led for the vast majority of Thursday’s game. But C’s coach Joe Mazzulla said he wasn’t bothered by the booing from the 114-105 loss. The opposite, in fact.
“I don’t mind getting booed,” Mazzulla said. “It’s good for you.”
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The Celtics also spoke at length about what went wrong as they didn’t come in with the right effort level. They likely relaxed some after James and Davis were both ruled out. On the flip side, the Lakers could play some carefree basketball since expectations were low with their stars both sitting Thursday.
“I’m not happy about it, but I’m not concerned by it,” Mazzulla said. “I think it’s unacceptable. Doesn’t mean I’m concerned. We’ll work through it. I think part of a bad stretch of basketball is physical just as much as mental, and I think those two things go hand in hand. So I think it’s unacceptable for those things to happen, but if you take a look at the whole scope of our season, they happen very little.”
The Celtics will now look to regroup after a strenuous stretch with plenty of games. They also get two days before they host the Grizzlies on Sunday. While it was an imperfect effort against the Lakers, they weren’t overreacting to one game considering it’s a long 82-game season.
“This quote always works for me: ‘You win or you learn,’” Kristaps Porzingis said. “You learn more from your losses 100%. If you win a lot of times, it covers some of the stuff. But a loss like tonight and even a tough game like Indiana, and of course we try to always look at each other, look at ourselves in the mirror like, ‘OK, even if we won, what are the things we need to clean up? What do we need to do better?’
“But it still doesn’t hit the same as when you actually get a loss. Then you really like, ‘OK, we need to get better at this, this, this, or this didn’t work, or we actually played all right but we just didn’t make shots.’ We definitely learn more from the losses and I think this is healthy for us.”
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