← Locked On Celtics - Daily Podcast On The Boston Celtics
Locked On Celtics - Daily Podcast On The Boston Celtics
Boston Celtics CRUMBLE as Charlotte Hornets DOMINATE | What went Wrong?
00:31:33
Boston Celtics unravel in 29-point blowout as Derrick White’s hot hand can’t rescue team from nightmare shooting night against the Charlotte Hornets. John Karalis of Celtics on SI breaks down the Celtics’ collapse at TD Garden, spotlighting missed layups, energy lapses, and a rare no-show from the bigs—including underwhelming outings by Neemias Queta, Nikola Vučević, and Luka Garza. The podcast tackles Jaylen Brown’s shooting struggles, Payton Pritchard’s scoring drought, and how Boston’s defensive drop coverage backfired, fueling a Hornets three-point barrage. Key stats—like a season-low five second chance points—highlight the Celtics’ struggles to generate their usual edge. With Dallas looming and Jayson Tatum potentially returning, can the Celtics find their form or is this a sign of deeper issues down the stretch?
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adventure now on the Lockdown Celtics Podcast if you ever wondered how the Celtics would look if the preseason expectations were right, well, now you know after watching how they played against the Charlotte Hornets. Hey there, welcome back to the Lockdown Celtics Podcast right here on the Lockdown Podcast Network where it is your team every day. Your team is the Boston Celtics and I talk about them every Monday through Friday plus bonus podcasts on the weekends when they play like Friday night Celtics play the Mavs. I'll have a bonus podcast there. But also during the week I dropped a bonus podcast as I very plainly hinted that I would. So during the week you'll get bonus podcasts as well. Make sure you're subscribed, get the show in your feed on YouTube and get into the comment section there. I'm John Corrales, beat writer for Celtics on SI. I've been covering the team for about 20 years doing this podcast for about 10. And today's show is brought to you by. Well, game Time Today shows brought to you by Game time. Download the GameTime app, create an account, use the code locked on NBA for $20 off your first purchase. Celtics got smoked. Smoked by the Charlotte Hornets. They never led. It's only the second time this season that they have not led in a game. They didn't do anything that they normally do. They looked Terrible, basically throughout the game. Any brief period of hey, maybe they're getting some momentum here. That went away quickly. They looked like how I think they would look like if all of the preseason expectations, if all of the stuff that people have been saying about them before the season started, if all of that stuff actually came true. I would say if they lived down to the expectations, this is what the team would have looked like. So later on we'll get into the bigs who were awful for the first time this season. All the bigs were terrible. The second segment, I'll get into the things that the Celtics didn't do that they normally do that would keep them in games like this. Like the offensive rebounding and causing turnovers. I want to start with the Buzzsaw. The absolute just kind of what the Hornets are doing right now. Six wins in a row, ten road wins in a row. The, the wins by 15 plus games. They. They've. They've won what is all six games by 15 plus. It's. It's the, the Hornets right now are just rolling. I was listening to a little bit of lockdown Hornets on my way home just to. I just kind of wanted to see what their reaction would be. And let me tell you, they are over the top over there. They are talking about championship contention right now. This win over the Celtics has got them giddy, giddy. So yeah, I would recommend going to check it out because they are flying high, no pun intended with the whole Hornets thing. So the Celtics came out just frigidly ice cold, un, unsustainably bad. They, they were, no matter how you slice it, awful shooting. They were. They shot 30 of 79 overall. They were 10 of 36 from three. So not only did the Hornets limit their three point makes, they limit their limited their three point attempts. The shots in the paint. 5 of 12 for the Celtics in, in the restricted area. That's compared to what were the Hornets. 9 of 13. I just want to pull this over here and take a look. Nine of 13. So they made four more with one more attempt. The Celtics just missed layup after layup after layup. And that was, that was part of why they were unable to do some of the things they normally do when you're five of 12. So you miss seven, seven shots at the rim. It's hard to get those rebounds those. And those turn into opportunities at the other end where it's. It's a five on four right. The, the guy who takes the layup misses and invariably his momentum is taking him away. From the basket. Like Joe talks about this all the time. And it's one of the most under discussed elements of basketball where yeah, live ball turnovers are the worst thing that can happen. You're dribbling, they steal a ball from you, they go the other way. That's. Oh, and there was plenty of that too. There was plenty of that as well. But that being the worst thing that could happen. A missed layup can often be the second worst thing that can happen. More than piling up the missed threes and all of that stuff. People say, well, you miss a three, you get the long rebound the team can get going the other way. But yeah, you also have the. Everybody's momentum is kind of going, but back this way. You even have the guy who shot the ball can get back. He could be the first one back to stop a fast break. Whereas the guy who shot the ball missing, missing a layup, that guy is under the rim. He's probably out on the baseline somewhere, maybe he's fallen, maybe he's complaining to the ref. And that invariably gives you a disadvantage or gives the other team an advantage. So the Celtics, their inability to hit from basically anywhere on the floor, they had a little bit of success later on in the paint. They non restricted which they were 14 of 27, but. And they were 2 of 3 from the left corner. Everything else was just, they just couldn't hit a thing. So number one on the things that cost the Celtics was they couldn't hit shots while the Hornets were plus nine in three point makes. So right away that's a 27 point hole. You got to make up that 27 points somehow. And the Celtics couldn't do that in either, in either end. And you, what you don't have is the shot margins. You don't have the, The Celtics shot 10 fewer shots and the free throws were basically even. So The Celtics had 20 free throw attempts and the Hornets had 21. So the shot attempt numbers are pretty accurate here. There's no, like sometimes it'll look like, oh, the Celtics only had 79 shot attempts, but they'll have 30 something free throws. And they really had a lot more shot attempts. They just got filed on a bunch of them. But this is all equal, it's all leveled out. The Celtics just couldn't find another spot anywhere in this game to make up for what they couldn't do. Shooting wise, that, that margin right there, losing the three point battle by 27, you lost the game by 29. That's it. That, that right there, you can just wipe your. That's where you lose the game. And it's true in the most. In the most basic way, that is where you lose the game. But all the other stuff the Celtics couldn't do and couldn't make up for. That's. That's why they lost it as badly as they did. And listen, the. The bottom line for the Celtics in this one, they didn't have it. They. They never had it in this game. Jalen, after the game, was talking about how the. You know, it's on me. I'm the leader. We had no energy. It's uncharacteristic, which it is. The. The Celtics had no energy. Hell, the building didn't even have any energy. The. Everything that could have gone wrong in there, including. Why am I doing this podcast from my home studio. Because the alarm was going off in the building, so nothing went right at TD Garden. The alarm after the game, when we were working the back started going off, and so I couldn't. I just left and just didn't record my. My podcast there like I wanted to. Had to come home. Everything was going wrong for the Celtics. And it happens again in the most basic way. You can just say you didn't shoot. Well, they did. You didn't have the energy. It happens. You move on. You flush it in a lot of ways. I mean, obviously, Joe Missoula is going to say, you never flush. You never just flush anything because there's always. You can go back and look and see 15 plays. Like he said, there's always 15 plays you can go look at. And there are for sure that the Celtics could have made a difference here. A lot of them were just layups that if you made the layup, things would have. Would have changed. If you want me to sum up this game in one sequence, we go to the end of the third quarter. End of the third quarter, the Celtics made a little bit of a run. Okay. They. There was about three minutes to go. At the end of the third, they put together an 8 to 3 kind of spurt where they were down. They started down 22. They go down 17. Okay, they get a stop. They come down. Jaylen Brown gets a pick from Nikola Vucevic. Vucevic and does an amazing move. An amazing move. Goes left, crossover right. Pinoy step over, goes to his left, and it's right there. The ball was hanging on the rim. Literally three full seconds. You just. Three seconds. 1,100 thousand. 2003. That's a long time for a ball to be sitting there. On the rim, it's usually like boing in and out. Fraction of a second, even just a couple of bounces. It's one second. They had almost three seconds of the ball sitting on the rim. By the time or by the time it went from Jalen Brown's hand to the rebound. He makes this great move. He blows the layup, right? It just lips out, and you're like, oh, man, this is brutal. And they get the ball, they go the other way. And in the span of 33 seconds, they put up six. Six straight buckets. So the Celtics, instead of being that. Instead of that layup falling and being down 15 with about a minute left, that's more than an opportunity. Three more chances to score, right? With. With 59 seconds on the clock, the Celtics can come down, get stops, and get three more opportunities or that. That would be the three. So it'd be two more opportunities for. For that. So you come down, you go up 15, you. You go down 15. If you come down, get a stop, come down, score 13, you have the potential to be down 11, even 10, it was an 8, 3 run. If you put together an 11, 3 12, 3 run over that, you know, just score a few more buckets there, you get that bucket and two more. The entire dynamic of this thing changes. Everything changes. But he misses the layup. They score six straight points, and you go into the fourth quarter down 23. So that's. That's. That's the. That's the microcosm of this game where the Celtics, just when they finally mustered some level of momentum, they miss a layup, and Charlotte just comes down. Boom, boom, boom. And you're like, got nothing deflated. That game over at that point. Second chances, turnovers, staples for the Celtics, absolute staples. They couldn't get either of them. I'll talk about that when I come back. Today's show is brought to you by Five Hour Energy. It's time for the Five Hour Energy flavor draft with 18 flavors to choose from, including new options like confetti craze, free rainbow and cotton candy. There's something for everyone. The board is set, the flavors are ready, and I got the number one pick for the five hour energy flavor draft. You the. The confetti craze, fruity rainbow, cotton candy are all sweet but no sugar. This is the big thing here. Now, if you have a sweet tooth, these are great ways to satisfy a sweet tooth. Get your energy without the. The extra kind of sugar crash. I'm not as big a sweet tooth guy, so my number one pick. I I've kind of gone back and forth, right? I get multiple opportunities to make my picks. I've gone grape, I've gone strawberry, watermelon. I think today I'm just gonna go with the straight old berry. Just big bold berry flavor, slightly sweet, very fruity flavor. It's a classic mixed berry flavor with notes of raspberry and BlackBerry. It's smooth without being overly sugary. A light tartness keeps it balanced and it's a familiar, easy to recognize fruit profile. Put that in a five hour energy shot when you need a little bit of a boost. You get that perfect taste without too much of that sweetness. Perfect for me. So that's going to be my number one pick tonight. You can find your new favorite flavor of 5 hour energy shots available at 5/5 our energy.com fivehourenergy.com or you can pick one up at Amazon. Today's show is also brought to you by Game Time. There's nothing like being in an NBA arena. The crowd, the energy, the moment. Getting tickets though, that's tough. That part has not always been easy. And especially though if you're a Celtics fan, maybe that Charlotte game down in down in Charlotte in a few a couple weeks there, maybe you want to use the Game Time app if you're down in that way to get your hands on some tickets. It's very easy. You have all in pricing. So if you're not familiar with the arena down there, you open it up, you'll see what the price is, whatever it says. If it says 75, then that's what you're going to pay. At checkout you get a view from your seat. If you don't know what the section numbers are, you say huh, what does this seat look like? It'll show you on the app. This is what the seat looks like. And then if you want to do a zone deal where you pick the section and the Game Time picks the seats, then you will, you will save a little extra there. It's great for last minute options. It's quick, it's intuitive, stress free from start to finish. So take the guesswork out of buying NBA tickets with Game Time. Download Game Time app, create an account, use the code locked on for $20 off your first purchase. I've used the app a few times so I don't get this. But you if this is your first purchase, you get that locked on, the code locked on for $20 off. Download the game Time app today. And remember, if you're using the web, it's gametime co gametime co thanks for making Lockdown Celtics your first listen. Every day, check out Lockdown NBA Lockdown NBA game Night. Game night is seven nights a week covering every game in the league at Lockdown NBA is during the week, Monday through Friday, five days a week. They're both in the same feed, so you want to catch up on the games and catch up on the big storylines. You get both podcasts in the same place. The Celtics normally, in games like this, give themselves a chance by getting offensive rebounds, by protecting the ball, and by turning the other team over. They did none of that in this game. None. This is the most amazing stat to me in this, is that the Celtics only had five second chance points. Five. They had zero in the first half. That is so unlike the Celtics because that's what they live on. That Joe Missoula has his guys playing with energy almost all the time. And again, look, it's. If you've played basketball for any extended amount of time, you know that sometimes game like this happens, right? You just, you ain't got it. And it's just never, it's never getting there. You. And unless you, like, get that layup and get that momentum, get that crowd behind you, it's just not happening. And we've all had those days at our own jobs, right? How many times have you gone to work and just been like, my brain is mush today. I got nothing. You got nothing for nobody today. So I'm, I'm done. I'm gonna online shop today. That's. I'm gonna watch YouTube vids and whatever. Whenever the boss walks by, I'm gonna quick change and make it look like I'm working, but I'm doing nothing today. Can't do that when you're a member of the Celtics. Can't do that in a pro setting. You're gonna get embarrassed by, you know, in front of 19, 000 people. Happens, all right? It happens. They didn't have the energy. They, they couldn't go out there and grab the, the offensive rebounds like they normally would. And a lot of those, like I said before, were missed layups. And so it's hard to get those. But the Celtics energy wasn't there, wasn't strong enough to go in and crash the boards and to only get five second chance points. Celtics shot 30 of 79. That is 49 misses, 49 misses. And you had nine offensive rebounds. That's. I don't even know what that percentage is, but I'm going to do it real Quick, I have a calculator. So they missed 49 shots. They. They. 18.4. Around 18.4% of their miss. This is just a terrible percentage. The Celtics have been up. Well, they've been much higher than that. In fact, while I'm talking, I'm going to pull up the stats because that is possible here, isn't it? Well, maybe not. Maybe. Well, it was possible and then it is not. But I can tell you what, their offensive rebounding percentage is super high. And okay, here it is. I gotcha. I know I'd get there. 34%. This is, this is high quality podcasting. 34. And what I say they were before 1918. That's obviously a horrible, horrible, horrible offensive rebounding rate. So to miss 49 shots, only get nine offensive rebounds with the team that you have with Namish keda out there, one offensive rebound. He only played 16 minutes. I'll get to him in a second. Nicola Vuchovic, 16, almost 17 minutes. One offensive rebound. Luca Garza got into the game for 15 minutes, zero offensive rebounds. What? Luca Garza, None. The only person who crashed and got rebounds was Hugo Gonzalez, who had four, Jalen had one, Sam had one, Nemi had one, Baylor had one, Vuch had one. Every. That's it. And then Ugo had four. So he had almost as many as everyone else combined. You're not going to win game if you're going to miss these shots. And it happens. You need to get offensive rebounds. And look, shout out to Joe Missoula, because I talked about it after the Nuggets game. I said, you know, you have. When you're missing these shots, you've got Luca Garza there. Why not use them? And you know, Joe learned that lesson himself, right? It's not like he listened to me, but the team didn't have it in in Denver. They ran out of gas, their legs went away. And I said, hey, why not have, you know, an energy guy, a rebound guy. And to Joe's credit, the next time that happened, he did go to Luca Garza. Luca didn't have anything in this game either. And then the turnovers, you. So, okay, you're not getting offensive rebounds. Can you, can you turn the other team over? Nope. Five turnovers total. And I think it was three before garbage time. So heading into garbage time was three. Three turnovers for three points. And the Celtics overall, 16 turnovers for 21 Charlotte points. That's so you lose on the shot shot margin. You lose the turnovers, you lose the offensive rebounding. Second chance points. You. You lose. That's it. You have no chance. You have no chance. If that's the case. So what do you, what did the Celtics do? I mean this is couldn't, couldn't hit, couldn't. Didn't have the. Just didn't have it. They didn't have anything. The bigs were the, the worst, absolute worst game that the Celtics front court has played. I'll get to that when I come back. Today's show is brought to you by TurboTax. It is tax time, but for a lot of us, the old way of doing taxes is a lot. It's a lot. Trying to book an appointment that's not the most convenient. Sitting in a waiting room with a stack of papers, emailing back and forth and wondering if they really get your situation. But this year you're getting a major upgrade. Intuit TurboTax now has in person locations nationwide. You can meet face to face with a real tax expert and your documents get uploaded straight to your TurboTax app on the spot. Just like that, you're done. TurboTax experts work to get you every dollar you deserve while you get real time notifications as you go about your day. It's the relief of walking in and meeting a real person and walking out knowing your taxes are being handled right. 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Thanks for making Lockdown Celtics your first listen Every day. You're an everydayer here with me Monday through Friday. Why not join the Everydayer Club? The Everydayer Club gives you ad free audio compatible with Apple Podcasts, Spotify and every other major podcasting app. It's also giving you access to the Everydayer Club Discord server which includes a group chat just for Celtics fans. Just for NBA fans. So you've got that and more at lockdown. Celtics.Supercast.com Locked on Celtics.Supercast.com I'll drop that link in the show Notes for you as well. This was, you know, I said at the top, if, if the preseason expectations that people had for the Celtics were accurate, this is what the team would look like. Jalen Brown played. Played okay, but not great. 7 of 19 shooting. His efficiency since January 1st has been bad, so he needs to. He needs to get that efficiency back up. But either way, 20 points, 11 rebounds, which was good. Seven assists, which is nice. Seven assists on a night where the team's shooting 38 is difficult. So that's meaningful. So it was, it was an okay game for Jalen, but not a great game. He missed a ton of layups and that. That hurts. But the questions, the preseason question was, could Jalen get the job done and, you know, say, okay, this is okay. Not great. Derrick White was good. He was the only guy that, that really came and played well. 9 of 17, 3 of 9, 8 of 8 from the line, 3 assists, a steal. Beginning of the third quarter, it was all Derek. And they kind of got away from that again, the Celtics getting away from something that worked. Sure, if I go back and look at it, the Hornets defense had some adjustments that they made to kind of change how that went, but either way, Derrick White was going and that. That really didn't do much for the Celtics, but okay, so you get Derek White, Peyton Pritchard. Big ol. Fail for Derek, for. For Peyton. Pritchard. 0 of 6. 05 from 3. 0 points. For the second time in three games, 0 points for Peyton. I don't know if he's hurt. He kind of is grabbing at a wrist or something, but either way. But he had a big game in between those two, so it's. It's not like he's incapacitated. He's just. Just a rough, rough time right now for Peyton. So. And then you get to the. The bigs. So preseason expectations of Jalen, could he do it? This is. This would be the worst case scenario. Peyton, could he do it? This is the worst case scenario. The bigs, you know, the. The so called worst front court in the NBA, something that I was sitting there saying, like, yeah, they might be okay. They proved that wrong. But in this game, they. That's exactly what they were. So when I said this is what life would be like if all those preseason expectations came to fruition, it's like that's how it actually went versus them, proving everybody wrong in every meaningful way. This is what the game would look like. This is what the Celtics would look like. And that's not a team that's 41 and 21 the bigs. Neemi, he, he banged knees or something. They were looking at his right knee. Something happened early on. He subbed out, was not even two minutes into the game. They were checking his knee and then he got back in the game and he looked, I mean, just, it was, it was Nene of last year. He's just flailing around and fumbling around and turning the ball over. It was, it was the absolute kind of worst case scenario for, for Neemi. Okay, it happens. It's one game. I'm not really worked up about it. It just happens. But that's, that was literally. It's just his worst game. And I don't know what the knee thing was. He came back in, played, so I'm assuming it's not a big deal. Vuch comes in, nothing. He gives them nothing. He hits one three pointer, gets to the line a couple times, you know, a few rebounds in the cyst. Just hit a block. But not nothing. Right. So this wasn't a case of, okay, Vuch comes in and, you know, saves the day. Nope. He. He didn't have anything either. So Joe goes to Luca Garza. Luca Garza has nothing. You know, he hit a couple of shots. He, you know, get, gets in. There was three of five. He had nine points, two rebounds, zero offensive rebounds. He also had a block, but meaning meaningless. None of the bigs, none of the bigs performed well. Every. Everything that could go wrong went wrong in this game. Jalen's. Jalen's big quote unquote, big night was inefficient and he missed a ton of layups and had three turnovers. Derek White, 29 points on 9 of 17 Shooting is great, but they couldn't sustain that. It couldn't, couldn't get him to carry them any further. No matter what he did in the beginning of the third quarter, he scored eight straight points and made no dent, no difference because the defense was just brutal. The drop coverage going back to the bigs, the, the drop coverage was, it was bad, it was problematic, and I got to go look at it again, but it's. You can do drop coverage effectively, but you just have to make sure that everybody's on the same page, everybody's communicating because you have to navigate the picks a certain way. You have to make sure that you're getting a certain, certain kinds of shots and, and if you're allowing the wrong kind of shots, then the drop coverage can kill you. Hornets were 7 of 11 in the paint, non restricted. You want to keep them in that long 2 area, that 6 of 16 in the mid range, that was great. Why couldn't they keep them in that six of 16? Why were they giving up so many three pointers, which is what the Hornets do. They love to take three pointers. So the defense was kind of brutal along the way. They got, they basically got nothing from anybody. Ugo had his moments, Baylor Scheireman had a couple of moments, but nobody had anything sustained except for Derek in the third quarter and they got away from that. So flush it, move on. Dallas is next. That could either be the biggest game on the schedule because Jason Tatum is coming back, or it could be, you know, and obviously Cooper Flag. Or it could be a nothing because Cooper Flag's been hurt and maybe he's not ready to play. Maybe Jason doesn't play. So I don't know. I'm betting that it's going to be a big night. So we'll see. Maybe I'm right, maybe I'm wrong. We'll figure it out together. So a new podcast tomorrow, plus a post game bonus podcast on Friday night into Saturday. So make sure you're subscribed. Wherever you get your podcast, watch the show on YouTube and I would love it if you share the podcast. Tell everybody they should be listening to and watching the Lockdown Celtics podcast here in the Lockdown Podcast network. It's your team every day.
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