
Boston Celtics unravel late as Denver Nuggets’ hot shooting and Jaylen Brown’s struggles fuel a wild finish. Has Brown’s MVP campaign hit a roadblock just as the national spotlight intensifies? John Karalis of Boston Sports Journal breaks down the Celtics’ narrow loss, spotlighting Brown’s 33-point outing overshadowed by seven turnovers and crucial fourth-quarter mistakes. With Denver piling up 20 three-pointers and Jamal Murray dishing 17 assists, the Celtics’ depth and clutch play falter against strong bench performances from Zeke Nnaji and Jalen Pickett. Key topics include Derrick White’s off night, Payton Pritchard’s limited impact, and the ongoing battle for Eastern Conference seeding with challenges looming against the Toronto Raptors and San Antonio Spurs. Can the Celtics regroup, or does this stretch threaten to derail their momentum? Don’t miss John Karalis’s sharp analysis on Boston’s next steps.
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John Karalis
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John Karalis
Denver got hot. Stayed hot. The Celtics got sloppy at the wrong time. And this is not going to do much for Jaylen Brown's MVP conversation. It's all right now on the Lockdown Celtics podcast. Lock on Celtics pod. Home of the winners, baby. Yeah. Welcome back to the Lockdown Celtics podcast right here on the Lockdown Podcast Network where it's your team team every day. Your team is the Boston Celtics and I talk about them every Monday through Friday. Plus bonus podcast. They've got games Friday and Saturday this week, so bonus podcasts seven days in a row of podcasting. Plus you get into next week. Oh, tons of free podcasting available to you everywhere. Podcasts exist. It's on YouTube. Watch the show there. If you're new to the show. I'm John Corralis. I'm a beat writer that covers the game, covers the team for Boston Sports Journal. I've written a couple books about the team. I've been doing this podcast for 10 years, been covering the team for 20. So if there's one thing I do like doing, it's talking about the Boston Celtics. Today's show is brought to you by FanDuel. Download the FanDuel app every Friday 6 to 7:30. You get the NBA Happy Hour with all sorts of specials. So check it out over@fanduel.com later on we'll get into individual performances in the depth. Depth versus depth on this team. Celtics playing their bench had been playing well and, you know, not bad this game either, but the, the Nuggets depth was just phenomenal. I'm going to save Jalen Brown for an extended conversation in the second segment. Let's just get right to the meat of this game where the Celtics lost this game late. They have the. It was a back and forth game. They had a lead that got up to, I think nine. The Nuggets had leads. They went back and forth, right? The Celtics started out well enough. Jaylen Brown, Derrick White, 35 points combined in the first quarter. They took a lead. The Nuggets won the second quarter. The Celtics won the third quarter. It was just run after run after run. Neither team was able to pull away until the Nuggets were able to make a late fourth quarter run. Starting at about a little bit after the eight minute mark where the Celtics were up three. And the Nuggets went on a run. You can say it was 14. Oh, you can say it was 19 to 3. The 19 to 3 run made it a 13 point game with 224 to go. And that felt. That was basically it. It was over. Jaylen Brown, Derrick White came out and then that group afterwards made a run. I think the Nuggets kind of relaxed and that group kind of played, you know, hard. And there's actually like a brief conversation to be had about how that group executed down the stretch. Baylor Scheireman tried to miss a free throw on purpose. Ended up being a violation. And I see why he did it. I didn't think anything of it in the moment, but then Peyton Pritchard gets filed on a three pointer. He hits all three, and the Celtics got it down to one possession at the end. It got up to 114, 100 because of Jamal Murray hitting some free throws at the end. But the Celtics had it within, you know, striking distance there. But that would. That would have been. That would have been an absolute, like, crazy if the Celtics had come back to tie that game at that point. It would have been like, don't even put Jalen in. Don't put even. Don't even put Derek in. Just let this group kind of go back, go through and finish overtime because maybe they can continue this magic. But it wouldn't have mattered. It didn't matter. The Celtics got super sloppy late in the game with. As part of that run, it was just turnover after turnover after turnover. The Celtics had five, I believe in the Final eight minutes. Jalen Brown had three. I think his three came in the final five. But that coupled with the Denver shooting was too much to overcome. Denver shot 20 of 44. So when another team makes 23 pointers, it's. It's tough to overcome that. This is. This is almost like the Family Guy thing where the guy in prison stabs himself. He goes, oh, my God. That's what I was doing to people. I belong here. The Celtics got out. Shot. They shot. The Celtics shot 15 of 38. They shot 39 and a half percent, which obviously is. Is good. The. The shooting from three kind of kept them in the game early on, like, Denver was hitting shots like crazy. I thought that Denver would come out with a strong kind of like, initial push. First quarter, I thought it was going to be more Denver than Boston, and it kind of was for a little while. The Celtics did a good job to come back and win that quarter, but they just never cooled off. And it was Peyton Watson shooting 6 of 7, Tim Hardaway Jr. 4 of 8. You got Duron Holmes, rookie center. He was one guy that I was looking at. Do you leave him open? How do you treat him? He's. He was shooting 40% coming into this game, but on like, I think it was 6 of 14 shooting overall this season. He had a long, long stretch of not playing because they had Nikola Jokic, they didn't need him to play, and now here he is. So they. The Nuggets just kept punishing the Celtics for mistake after mistake after mistake. And the. The end result, my line of questioning after the game was, do you. When you are making these mistakes down the stretch, when the other team just keeps coming down and burying you with three pointer after three pointer after three point, do you feel the pressure? Do you feel like every time you make a mistake, you're like, oh, my God, it's another three pointer. Oh my God. Like, here. Here comes another. Like, they just kept punishing the Celtics over and over and over. Anytime the Celtics made a mistake, they couldn't get away with it. It's not like you made a mistake and they made a mistake and you're like, okay, that was a freebie. Let's. Okay. Moving on to the next play. Every time it felt like Boston made a mistake, there were the Nuggets to cash in on it somehow. 14 turnovers for Boston leading to 15 points. The Celtics turned the Nuggets over nine times for nine points. That is not one of the margins that they normally lose. The Celtics had a ton of offensive rebounds. But the second chance points, they won by 11. It could, it could have been, it should have been more than that. And maybe if it was more than that, this game would have been different. But also, I just side note a little bit of a skewed number. They were 11 of 20 from, you know, on second chance points, I would say three or four of those were Namishkeda going back to his own misses. So you wouldn't have gotten the 20 shots if he put one of those in. So the percentage would have looked better, but the actual number of offensive rebounds would have gone down. And I don't think the points would have changed because they did finish off, I think a couple of those plays, the two that I'm thinking of. So anyway, the point is that the Nuggets just kept killing the Celtics with the shooting. The, the Celtics threw a bunch of double teams at Jamal Murray in that fourth quarter. And what does he do in the fourth quarter? He had six assists in the fourth quarter. That when, when the other team, you, you, you come up with a defensive strategy, you think, all right, we're going to make someone other than Jamal Murray beat us. And he starts spraying it around and has six assists. And they hit four of seven from three in the fourth quarter. And the Celtics go two of nine. The Celtics had 26 shots in the fourth quarter. Denver had 19. The Celtics had seven more opportunities and they couldn't finish them. And the Nuggets just kept hitting shots. Zeke Najee, I mean, look, this will be, you know, I'll save this for the depth part, but you got in the fourth quarter, big numbers from Zeke Najee, Jalen Pickett, they were cashing in on the passes that Jamal Murray was making and, and credit to Jamal Murray for making the right play and credit to these guys for finishing it off and hitting shots and being aggressive and getting to the line. Now, Jaylen Brown spent the entire almost post game press conference, I would say, let's see, he spoke for probably like five minutes. I'd say three and a half of those minutes were spent talking about the officiating, Jalen Brown's night and the Celtic sloppy play. That is all coming up next. Today's show is brought to you by Rocket Money. Let's be real. Managing your finances can feel overwhelming. It's tough, especially after the holidays. You've got a bunch of money that you've spent. You've been subscribing to things left and right. 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But I'm going to be there after that game on Saturday. It's against, oh, the San Antonio Spurs. Victor Wembanyama. I'm definitely going to be there after that game. That's a late start, but I'll have post game for you on both of those. So check it out. Jalen Brown, he had a 33 point game, but this, this was not, I don't think this was a great Jaylen Brown game. And this is not going to help his, the MVP conversation at all because he was a minus 14 in this game. In a game they lost by four. Namish Kada was a minus 16 and Derek White was a minus 14. So these, these are not great numbers for these guys. And almost all of that, you know, was like Jalen was in the first quarter. The Nuggets were, you know, they were, they were up. Jalen comes out, the Celtics take a lead. Jalen in the fourth quarter comes in, the Celtics struggle a little bit. Honestly, this was. Jalen said after the game that he like basically saying the refs got into his head that he was expecting, you know, he has been expecting the calls to come a certain way and you didn't get any calls in this one which, you know, he went to the line three times, one of three from three that, I mean from, from the free throw line. He did drive a lot. He took 29 shots. Only six of them were from three. And to get to the line three times. I think Jalen has a point, but he spent a lot of time talking about the officiating and how that wasn't what he was expecting and he, he thought he should have gotten a better whistle and he kind of let that get into his head. This was the kind of game where it was like Jalen reverting to some bad habits. And he was good early on, but then he started to try to do too much when Jalen is, is going up for shots and then trying to pass right before he lands, like looking for a bailout and outlet like that. I don't like that version of Jalen because that's, that's a Jalen. That's not driving and making the right reads necessarily. He's driving with a purpose to, to score at all costs. And hey, he's probably done that a ton this season and it's worked. But in this scenario, it didn't work. And so it, it becomes more glaring. He was not driving and making good reads. He was driving and trying to score against the defense that was playing well. And the Nuggets defense has not really been great this season. And you know, they, they played him well. He, he was looking for bailout passes and not looking for shooters. He wasn't just making the right play, drawing a defense and kicking and working the ball around. And then late in the game, he had the three turnovers. He finished with seven turnovers. He had 33 points, seven rebounds, four assists. The, the numbers, the raw numbers look good, but the seven turnovers really stand out. The three of them down the stretch where the Celtics couldn't, just couldn't do anything as the Nuggets were building their 13 point lead, which was their biggest lead of the night. Jalen was not playing well at all in that stretch. And now here you are, the conversation we, you know, we've had. What, how many conversations about Jalen potentially being an mvp And I don't think he's going to win, but he has an opportunity to win because he's doing so much with less than, I think, a lot of these other candidates. And it's only January 8th. Plenty of time to put this, this performance in the rear view mirror and play great and move on and almost forget about this. So I'm not sitting there saying like, this has ruined anything, but also this was like the most poorly timed fourth quarter meltdown because he had just had this 50 point game. And the national kind of conversation around Jalen was starting to be like, hey, you know what? He is a viable NB MVP candidate. And here comes espn. They flexed this game into their primetime schedule. They moved the Milwaukee Bucks. Who are the Bucks playing in this. This one. They moved the Milwaukee Bucks game out of it. Now, now I want to know. Bucks. Oh, Bucks. Warriors. Which was, you know, looks like it was a decent game. Warriors won 121 13. That was the original ESPN game. They moved that out to get Celtics and Nuggets in. And now Jalen has this game, this fourth quarter, and there are a lot of people who don't really watch, like every game the way we do. So he shows up on ESPN and there are, I'm sure, plenty of voters who are like, okay, let me see what this Jaylen Brown thing is all about right They've seen him a couple times. Like, he's been pretty good. Let's take a look. Let's see what he's got against the Denver Nuggets. And you know, he has, he definitely has his moments, right? He shot 14 of 29. It's not bad. Four of six from three. That was great. It looked like he was early on, it was like, hey, he needs a bounce back from that Chicago game. And he, he kind of did. But then that fourth quarter, you got the national media, you got him kind of melting down a little bit. There are plenty of people out there who were like, ah, okay, see, you know, like, look at you looking at me and Tom saying, like, you guys did a whole podcast, like, bemoaning how the advanced analytics weren't really telling the story about Jaylen Brown. And here they are. This is the exact game where the analytics pile up against Jalen Brown. He had a nice game, 33 points, seven rebounds, four assists, a steal. But the seven turnovers, the defense wasn't great. He made a couple of defensive mistakes. The, the, the defense was not as good with him out on the floor. And so when the people are putting their MVP case together, there's definitely going to be a voter out there or two that's going to be like, oh, I remember that Denver game. He kind of sucked and he, he didn't come through in the clutch there. So Jalen's going to have to come through, like in one of these nationally televised games against San Antonio, he's going to have to come through against San Antonio and, and if it becomes a clutch situation, he's going to have to come through and perform in the clutch. Just to wash the taste of this one out of people's mouths again, to be clear here, I don't think this is, like, going to end any candidacy. One single game, especially in the early part of January, it doesn't end the conversation. But for the people who are always looking to, to eliminate Jalen from the conversation, this is going to be like, ah, see? And people are looking for that confirmation by, like, they want their, their opinions to be validated. Just like I wanted my opinion on Jalen on, on Trey Young to be validated over and over and over again. I spent years being called a hater, and here he is being traded for Corey Kispert and C.J. mcCollum and no picks. And I feel vindicated. Vindicated. Right. And so people are going to have kind of like that same opinion on Jaylen Brown when they're like, you know, yeah, he's having a great season, but is he on the level of Shea? Is he on the level of Luca? And then you have this type of game, especially after like the, the Lakers keep winning club. The Lakers, I don't know what they did in on Tuesday night, but the Lakers keep winning these clutch games. They lost to the spurs. Okay, they, but they lost by 16. They either lose by 16 or they win these clutch games. And luka, triple double 38, 10 and 10. So people who are like, yeah, man, Luke is different, Shay's different, Jalen is nice, he's having a great season. But look at that game that he had against Denver. That's what this game is going to do for them. People who, people who are already not inclined to give Jalen that, that kind of like benefit are going to be this, this kind of is a point in their favor. So we'll come back, we'll talk about the, the depth versus depth, the individual performances to wrap up the show that is coming up next. Today's show is brought to you by fanduel Fridays. We love Fridays, right? And fanduel is making them even better because before the games tip off, you get the NBA Happy hour every Friday from 6 to 7:30pm Eastern. It's your official pregame. It's a little, little limited time window. My mouth is going to do what I tell it to do and say these words from 6 to 7:30. You got 90 minutes before the game. Slip off to open up the FanDuel app and check out the specials that they've got weekly specials, you've got boosts, you've got bonuses, you got surprises. You never know what you're going to find during the NBA happy hour. So open up the app, check it out and we'll see. It's timing is perfect. 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John Karalis
Thank you for making Lockdown Celtics your first listen every day. Thank you for being an everydayer with me every Monday through Friday plus bonus podcast Now Join the Everydayer Club if you want to be an everyday and and get the most out of it. You want Ad Free Audio Join the Everydayer Club Add free audio every every on every major podcasting app. So check it out. You can get to any show on locked on.podcast.com everyday or you want to go to lockdown celtics.supercast.com to join the Everydayer Club. You also get access to our Discord server merchandise drops, all that stuff. Five bucks a month or 50 bucks for the year. So if you you sign up ahead of time, you get a couple of months free. The Celtics depth has been something that we've been celebrating recently and, and the depth was kind of there. Anthony Simons was pretty good 15 points. He got hot again, 6 of 9 shooting 3 of 4 from 3. He is definitely more comfortable. And you know I've talked about this before. His locker in the locker room beginning the season was kind of empty and barren. Now it looks like a normal locker. Like I feel like he's comfortable and I still don't know what's going to happen with him and I don't know why. It was empty before, but now it looks normal. Like he feels comfortable. He feels like he belongs here and he's, he's, he's definitely playing a lot better lately. Luca Garza comes in and plays well. Ugo Gonzalez was a plus nine. Who was the best outside? Baylor Scheimen was a plus 13 in four minutes. He was part of that stretch where the Celtics kind of made a crazy run. But Ugo was very impactful. His defense was really, really good. So the bench depth was there, but the Nuggets depth Was better because you got Naji scoring 12 points and coming up big in that fourth quarter. Picket was big in that fourth quarter. The bench points were very heavily tilted in The Nuggets favor 49 to 31. So the depth, even without Jokic was huge for, for Denver. And look, the, the Celtics bench hasn't been, you know, a huge strength for them all season long, but they're starting to figure that out. So getting that, that kind of 15 from Simons, 11 from Garza, and to get that many points from their bench, you know, regardless of whether they were outscored or not by the Denver Nuggets on most nights, the Celtics getting 31 points from their bench is going to be very, very helpful. The problem is that outside of jalen, you get 17 from Pritchard, who was okay, 17 from Derrick White, who, you know, did, did a lot of things. Defensively he was great scoring, you know, it's. He was defending in transition. Just 3 of 12 shooting for him, 1 of 6 from Peyton Pritchard. So 4 of 18 shooting from Pritchard and white from three. That's, that's a problem. That's just like all season long those two have, have been so like hot or cold, there's like the consistency just hasn't been there. So they were four of 18. The rest of the Celtics were 11 of 20 from three. So everyone else, Jalen was four of six, Hauser was two of six, Simon's three of four, Garza one of one, Gonzalez one of two. Jordan Walsh missed one. So the Celtics shot pretty well except for those two guys. If you get anywhere decent scoring shooting from Pritchard and White, I think this game obviously goes very differently because now they're able to keep up with the Nuggets and the Nuggets don't pull away and things just go a bit differently. But the, the Denver Nuggets get to say that their depth has really paid off and they are, they are getting great performances. Peyton Watson scored 30 in this game. Jamal Murray 22 points and 17 assists. He was awesome in this game. So the, the Nuggets get to like the, the, the bragging rights. They, you know, at the end of a seven game road trip, they played great, better than anybody I thought would have expected. The Celtics in the fourth quarter kind of reverted to the old Celtics from earlier this season. They didn't look like themselves. Jalen was out of sorts. They were disorganized. It just didn't look great. Hauser played almost 30 minutes and only got six shots. They were all three pointers. Keda had 20 rebounds, which is a career high. 10 offensive rebounds, which is a career high. But he also like. Of those 10 offensive rebounds, if. If he had just put back the first miss, he probably would have had five offensive rebounds. But still, you know, getting in there and clearing rebounds is a huge thing, and he did a good job of that. So look, the Celtics, very fixable. This is just. Sometimes you have these games. They were able to win a game where they didn't play great, shoot great against the Bulls. Now they played well for most of this game, well enough. But then in the fourth quarter, they just didn't have that. That clutch kind of performance. So they need to get back to that. They. It's been a while since they've had a bad fourth quarter, so it's not like I'm worried about this, but Toronto is always a problem. San Antonio is. Is one of the best teams in the league. And if Wembanyama is playing and off his minutes restriction or the minutes restriction allows for him to play in the fourth quarter, that's going to be a problem. I don't know how the Celtics handle that because who can handle Victor Womenyama? So this is going to be a tough stretch. This. This is not the easiest stretch in the world for the Celtics. And, you know, we'll see how they can pull through here. They have dipped back to the third seed because the Knicks, I saw them losing at halftime. They must have come back. Yeah, they came back against the Clippers. So Celtics dip back into the third seed. You got to be careful now because if they lose to Toronto that, you know, there. There's only a game in between them. The Celtics can dip to the fourth seed. So it's. There's still so much of the season left that still. I don't know where the Celtics are going to end up. But this is the. This is a test. This is going to be a test coming up. We'll talk about that test tomorrow for sure. But honestly, if. If Jalen just kind of kept his head on straight, didn't worry about the refs as much as he did, and kind of drove with more of a purpose, I think this game would have gone differently. Derrick White shoots a little bit better. This goes differently. Peyton Pritchard, same thing. So. And. And if the Nuggets maybe missed a couple of shots, so the win was right there. You're going to lose some games at the end of the day. Sometimes you lose in the NBA and it's okay. It's okay to lose sometimes in the NBA. So it's not like I'm, I'm not, you know, going off the deep end or anything like that. Just some things need to be better and they got to clean that up. Against Toronto, if you don't, the Toronto Raptors will beat you. And if you don't do it against the spurs, the spurs will beat you. That, they might beat the Celtics anyway, but that's going to be a good game. Got to be careful, like, the Toronto game is an important game now because you don't want to go down and lose three in a row. After San Antonio, you go on the road, so you've got Indiana, Miami, Atlanta, Detroit, so that there's, you know, a couple of winnable games in there, but you just don't want to, you don't want to go into the road trip on a losing streak. So Toronto becomes a, you know, kind of a big game. I'll talk about it. I'll be there at the Toronto game. I'll be there at the spurs game. Postgame podcast we'll obviously, obviously have a podcast tomorrow for your Friday enjoyment. But for now, thank you so much for listening. Thank you so much for watching. Being an everydayer. If you want to join the everydayer club, it's locked on Celtics every supercast.com lockdown Celtics supercast.com five bucks a month or fifty bucks for the year. Ad free audio discord server merchandise drops all that stuff. Now. Please share the podcast. Tell everybody they should be listening to and watching the Lockdown Celtics podcast here on the Lockdown Podcast network. It's your team every day.
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Episode: Boston Celtics Struggle Late as Jaylen Brown and Derrick White COLLAPSE in Denver Loss
Date: January 8, 2026
Host: John Karalis (Boston Sports Journal)
Length: ~35 minutes (ad segments omitted)
This episode analyzes the Boston Celtics' narrow loss to the Denver Nuggets, focusing on the team's late-game struggles, especially by Jaylen Brown and Derrick White. Host John Karalis digs into how a promising performance unraveled in the fourth quarter, what went wrong for Boston, and what the loss means for Brown’s MVP conversation and the Celtics’ ongoing playoff positioning.
Competitive Early Game
Fourth Quarter Collapse
Too Many Mistakes, Denver Too Hot
Denver’s Execution vs. Boston’s Frustration
Statline and On-Court Influence (20:00):
Frustration with Officiating (21:15):
Reverting to Bad Habits (22:10):
Late-game Meltdown and National Conversation (23:00):
Notable Quote:
Celtics Bench Shows Flashes, But Outdone (25:20):
If Only the Role Players Hit Shots… (26:40):
Team Regression & Worries (29:20):
Not Time to Panic, But Tests Ahead (30:45):
Crucial Adjustments:
Final Thought:
On Denver’s response to Boston’s mistakes:
On Jaylen Brown’s outlook:
On Boston’s depth and opportunities missed:
John Karalis maintains an analytical, candid, and slightly conversational style—balancing deep basketball insights with a sense of perspective (“It’s okay to lose sometimes in the NBA”). He’s transparent both in analysis (“I don’t like that version of Jalen…”) and in what this loss means going forward—neither doomsaying nor sugarcoating. He also brings in league context, MVP discourse, and the impact of national perception on individual accolades.
You’ll walk away understanding exactly how and why Boston let this one slip late, how Jaylen Brown’s rough fourth quarter could ripple into MVP discourse, and which role players mattered on both sides. The show highlights key numbers, coaching decisions, and what’s at stake as the Celtics enter a crucial stretch in their schedule.