When Your Schedule Loss Is Nationally Televised & Other Notes

When you play too many games over a short period of time, there is often a loss that is referred to as a "schedule loss." I first learned about this from Zach Lowe (I miss Zach Lowe). No team is immune from this phenomenon. Sometimes it's playing a road game on a back-to-back. Sometimes it's a long road trip. Sometimes it's playing five games in seven days. For the Celtics, Thursday's game was all three.

This happened earlier in the season, when from Dec. 1 to 7, they played in Cleveland, and then had home games vs. Miami, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Memphis. They won the middle games of that stretch, losing close games to Cleveland and Memphis. The media seemed more understanding of the Memphis loss, but on Thursday, there was a lot of howling. There has been a lot of howling lately in general. Writing scathing rebukes after each loss is something I've tried to avoid, because it's the lowest possible hanging fruit, but the media machine now turns 24/7, and the beast must be fed its content.

Any close Celtics watcher could tell that the C's didn't look right on Thursday. The starting lineup was worn out. The three starters who played the night before in the OT loss against the Clippers – Jayson Tatum, Jaylen Brown, and Derrick White – combined to shoot 13-for-36. The 36 is just as important there as is the 13. Tatum only took 12 shots, and didn't play at all in the fourth.

The 12 field goal attempts were Tatum's lowest for a single game this season, and tied for one of his three lowest over the past two seasons. His lowest? Six, last season, on January 11 in Milwaukee. You remember that game? Like Thursday, it was also the Celtics' fifth game in seven days, played on the road the night after they needed overtime to pull out a win (in this case, Minnesota). Milwaukee memorably blew the doors off the Celtics in this game, and coach Joe Mazzulla left the starters on the bench after halftime. That one game let people remain delusional about the Bucks for months.

The real question to me is not why the Celtics lost this game. To be clear, they did plenty of suboptimal things in this game, as did coach Joe Mazzulla: he took out Kristaps Porzingis and Jaylen Brown at nearly the same time in the first quarter when they had scored 19 of the team's first 22 points, he was slow with his substitutions in general, and while he had the master stroke to put Jaden Springer in for defense the night before, he refused to play him even as the Lakers were getting to the hoop on command. After Jaylen's hot start, he cooled off in a big way and took a lot of questionable shots. Payton Pritchard couldn't hit water from a boat. Luke Kornet had his first truly awful game in two months, he couldn't stay in front of anyone. And Tatum took too long to get cooking, and wasn't looking for his shot. There's a lot of blame to go around if you want to blame them. But my main question is why the NBA keeps doing this.

There's a lot of reasons to not like the current format of the NBA Cup, but this is the main reason. In order to give deference to the Cup Semifinals and Finals, the C's (and most other teams) played just three games over a 12-day span from Dec. 8-19th. The end result of that is that it smushes the schedule into some undesirable outcomes on either end of it, and as a result the C's had these two stretches of five games in seven days. I suppose there's a tradeoff there, but why the NBA thought it was a good idea to schedule the C's for national TV on that fifth game in seven days is beyond me. If it's a matter of getting C's-Lakers on national TV, they could have switched the Clippers-Lakers game and had C's-Lakers on ESPN/ABC on Wednesday night. Seems like an easy fix, except that ABC doesn't like broadcasting NBA games on Wednesday's. So the Celtics were left with a schedule loss on national TV. Shrug.

Coming Out of the Woods

One big reason I'm confident that it was the schedule and not part of a deeper problem with the team? The way they responded yesterday. That was the first time in awhile that they looked like the Celtics of last season – the kind of team that methodically built a 5-point lead, then a 10-, 15-, and 20-point lead, and flexibly endured the other team's late-game run and put the game to bed without too much fuss. And this was the final, really difficult portion of Boston's schedule. I did a bunch of schedule analysis before the season, but looking back I guess I never wrote about it. Of the teams in the East's top five right now, Boston has both the fewest remaining games, and the fewest remaining back-to-back's once the schedule flips to February:

Also, while people are busy critiquing every little thing about the Celtics, they went 6-2 across their two four-game road trips this month. January is the month when they had the most road games – 10 total, two more than in any other month of the season. They have one more on Friday in New Orleans, but so far they're 6-3 on the road this month. Not too shabby.

Zooming out, while many will likely continue to focus on the 11-9 record over the last 20 games, or the Lakers blowout, the C's actually picked up two games in the standings this week. On Monday, they were 6.5 games behind Cleveland, but combine their 3-1 record this week with Cleveland's three-game losing streak and the C's are back to being just 4.5 games back. While everyone in New England was busy sweating the C's for their late-game execution in the Clippers game and the blowout vs. the Lakers on Friday, Ty Jerome got psyched out by the Sixers mascot and literally tossed the game away:

(To answer your question, no, I don't know why the refs let the mascot stand that close to the action, I wouldn't think that would be allowed either. Still hilarious though.)

Most people, myself included, have left the one seed for dead, but while the C's are 6-4 over their past 10 games, Cleveland is 5-5. If Boston can keep it this close heading into their two remaining games with Cleveland next month, and win both, the one seed will still very much be in play.

It's a long season, and the C's are coming out of the schedule woods.

The Search Is Over

People like to talk about who the next great American superstar is. The people have spoken. It's Jayson Tatum. Let's take a look at the All-Star Game voting results:

The above table contains the 19 players who received more than 1 million fan votes in this year's balloting, and how they fared in the player and media voting as well (95 media members voted). As you can see, Tatum finished third overall for the second consecutive season. Let's take out the foreign-born players:

Now we're down to 14 players who received 1M+ votes. I also put in the two players who also frequently wind up in the "Greatest American Player" discussion – Ja Morant and Zion Williamson. As you can see, they're a far cry from this discussion. Almost no one cares about Zion anymore, and Ja isn't doing much better even with Memphis' resurgence this season. The reason is simple – they don't play enough. Tatum's greatest strength is that he is always there. He always suits up. He's only missed three games this season. Only one of those was a road game (Orlando on Dec. 23rd), when he was sick, and still tried to go through warm ups and play before the team finally ruled him out minutes before game time.

That's not the only reason why these results are so significant. It's also the first time Tatum got more votes than LeBron James:

This summer in Paris, Tatum had to take a backseat to LeBron and Kevin Durant, but all that's over now, and it's abundantly clear that no American player has the universal respect from fans, players, and the media that Tatum does. He's also entering his prime years. Let's look at the second table again but with player ages included:

Donovan Mitchell, Jalen Brunson, Jaylen Brown, and Ja Morant are the only other players in that 25-28 prime ages territory. I could make a credible case for Mitchell, if I'm being honest, but he has a lot of playoff failures under his belt, and needs to at least get to an NBA Finals before his narrative changes. Brunson? He's been a great story and is a great player, but he doesn't play good defense and so much of his offense is built around foul grifting. Both reasons caused him to be left off the Olympic roster this past summer. JB could get there if he ever was more consistent and efficient, but he's 28 and it hasn't happened yet. Anthony Edwards is not there yet – the T'Wolves gave him the car keys this season and they immediately became thoroughly mediocre. In addition to often being injured, Ja still has a lot of atoning to do, and seems disinterested in doing so. Also, he's won a grand total of one playoff series in his career. Tatum has won 14.

People can continue deny reality if they like, but the people have spoken – Jayson Tatum is now the greatest American superstar.