Finishing Quarters

Anecdotally, one of the things the Boston Celtics have been very good at this season is finishing quarters strong. They've been good at maintaining or extending a lead, or cutting into a deficit. Tonight, they went 0-for-4, and it cost them their home winning streak. The focus will be on the fourth quarter, but the C's closed all four quarters poorly.

First Quarter

After starting up 5-0, the first quarter was very back and forth, and no one led by more than three points until a Jayson Tatum fadeaway put the C's up 30-25. After a Nikola Jokic bucket on the other end, Tatum would put in a dunk over Christian Braun to again put the C's up five with 1:06 left in the quarter. But in that last minute, Nuggets sixth man Reggie Jackson put in two buckets and instead of being up five after one, the C's had a scant one-point lead.

Second Quarter

The biggest lead either team would have in this game would be the 12-point lead the C's built with 3:30 left in the second. But the next three scores would be Denver's, to quickly trim the lead back to five points. The killer, and possibly the trip where the momentum irrevocably flipped, was a sequence where the C's got two cracks at the hoop before Jokic got a rebound. Jaylen Brown forcibly picked his pocket, and the C's got three more chances to score, and came up empty. Five shots, none sunk. This occurred with them up seven and went from 2:41 left in the second to 1:37 left in the second. Jamal Murray quickly came down the other end and put in a layup to cut the lead to five points.

The C's would end the quarter up six points after a bad Tatum step-back three-point attempt. On the one hand, that was a quarter they won by five points, but on the other hand they had just been beginning to put space between them and Denver, and Denver quickly sapped that momentum. It felt like they blew a golden opportunity.

Third Quarter

With 4:54 and then again with 4:13 left in the quarter, Derrick White hit shots to push Boston's lead to eight points, and then with 3:40 he hit a three to give them a nine-point lead. It was all downhill from there. The C's didn't score again in the quarter, and Denver put together three buckets and two free throws to cut the lead to one, 82-81, at the end of the quarter.

Fourth Quarter

A lot will be made of the final 4:51 of this game. The first bucket of the quarter gave the C's a three-point lead. Between then and the 4:51 mark, they would either be down or up less than that. A Jaylen lay-up put them up 98-95 with 4:51 left. The only bucket the C's got the remainder was a pretty dunk from Tatum on a drive from the three-point line. People will likely kill the C's for this in the media. With all respect though, it's not like Denver was on fire. They put in just three buckets in that time. They shot 3-for-10 in that stretch. The C's were playing great defense.

...

I'm not overly sweating this loss, because there were just a lot of weird bounces (one example, there was a play where Kristaps Porzingis had Jamal Murray timed perfectly for a block, but then the ball slipped out of Murray's hands and bounced off Porzingis as he was jumping, and the ball trickled out of bounds off him) and the C's only lost by two points in a game where they only shot 31.8% from three. However, there is mounting evidence that the C's are underperforming against top teams. Against the other five teams who are in the top three in their respective conferences – Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Minnesota, Oklahoma City, and Denver – the C's are just 4-5. I don't want to make too much of that stat. If you extend it to the top four in each conference, and pull in Cleveland and the LA Clippers, the record improves to 7-5. But it's something worth monitoring.

It's not the worst thing to have a little heartbreak in the regular season, and hopefully with the home winning streak over, it takes a little pressure off, but that was a frustrating loss. If there's any solace to take, it was a close game, and Denver had to shorten their rotation to seven guys in order to win. In a seven-game series, they wouldn't be able to just play seven guys, and that would be to Boston's advantage, especially when one of the seven is a guy in Peyton Watson who shot multiple air balls in this game. But it is frustrating that the C's didn't close quarters like they usually do, because tonight it cost them a win.