In order for an NBA team to surrender a 23-0 run and blow a 22-point lead, a lot has to go wrong. And there were plenty of missteps that went into the Boston Celtics' 121-113 loss to the Detroit Pistons on Tuesday afternoon, which saw the Green Team collapse down the stretch and get outscored 76-55 in the second half.
Labeling the biggest problem from the season-opening defeat is a challenge. Celtics star Jayson Tatum scored just 2 points in the fourth quarter, Boston was outrebounded 49-39, and Detroit shot over 55 percent from deep in the final 12 minutes of play at Little Caesars Arena. The list of issues is longer than that, but no failure is more preventable, arguably, than fouling — and fouling 3-point shooters in particular.
"We were fouling,"
Tatum said when asked about the Pistons' second-half avalanche, via CLNS Media. "That kind of slows the game down."
Although the C's led by double digits at halftime, the tide began to turn with about 4 minutes to go in the third quarter. The Pistons were starting to heat up from beyond the arc and the Celtics may have overcompensated on defense, as wing Sam Hauser contested a triple from Pistons guard Isaiah Joe a little too closely and fouled him just before the shot clock expired. Joe converted on 2 of his 3 free throws and cut Boston's lead all the way down to 4 points with 2:32 remaining.
The fouling woes didn't end there. In fact, they got worse for Boston. Near the start of the fourth quarter, Pistons forward Duncan Robinson got free on the perimeter and immediately went to shoot a 3-pointer. Celtics point guard Payton Pritchard, who's usually a disciplined defender, grazed Robinson in the act and gifted the surging Pistons 3 more free throws.
Robinson did it again a minute later, almost slowing down when he had an open shot from deep so that Hauser could run into him. The New Hampshire native proceeded to make all 3 of his free throws to drop the Celtics' lead to a single point with 7:07 left in regulation.
"We fouled a jump shooter three times," Celtics head coach Joe Mazzulla said at the podium. "I think Robinson missed a free throw. That's 8 points right there on fouling jump shooters."
Joe and Robinson combined for 7 points off of those three aforementioned fouls and, perhaps most devastatingly, the final miscue was part of the 23-0 barrage that buried the Celtics. Boston finished with 10 free throw attempts in the second half while the Pistons tried a whopping 24, with 14 of those coming in the fourth quarter alone.
"We'll go back and watch — we'll separate, out of the 76 points (in the second half), which came from our offense and which came from our defense," Mazzulla stated. "Some of those things were a byproduct of our lack of offense in that third quarter...We have to fix our offense to prevent some of those, and then, which ones came from our half-court defense and our execution."
Even when the Celtics had the Pistons beat on a few possessions, they bailed out their Eastern Conference foe with fouls. Of course, the C's could've made more triples of their own, moved the ball better on offense, or crashed the glass harder. But, those things are generally harder to do against a big and strong Pistons squad.
Now, colliding with a 3-point shooter? That's more avoidable.
The Celtics will try to correct some of those mistakes heading into Friday night, when they host the reigning champion New York Knicks at TD Garden.
"Can we quickly bounce back?" Mazzulla posed rhetorically. "They had two big runs that we just couldn't get out of, and that's what we'll focus on."
Listen to "Havlicek Stole the Pod" on:
Blue Wire: https://tiny.ee/CdKp
iTunes: https://tiny.ee/RK47
YouTube: https://tiny.ee/cOW3
This article originally appeared on Celtics Wire: Jayson Tatum, Joe Mazzulla point to fouls as part of collapse vs. Pistons
