Celtics don’t do the hustle
Mark Murphy
Almost everyone was a winner last night. Mike Napoli, just by taking a front row seat and putting his biblical beard on display, became an inspiration.An impromptu beard contest was started, with all kinds of hairy mugs featured on the Jumbotron. The display ended, and the Red Sox first baseman was declared the winner. They […]
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Boston Herald
Almost everyone was a winner last night. Mike Napoli, just by taking a front row seat and putting his biblical beard on display, became an inspiration.

An impromptu beard contest was started, with all kinds of hairy mugs featured on the Jumbotron. The display ended, and the Red Sox first baseman was declared the winner. They gave him a $100 Legal Sea Foods gift certificate.

In fact, everyone was in the spirit except for the team that had just won four straight games. This time the Celtics, in an 89-83 loss to the Charlotte Bobcats, came out with sapped energy.

During one fourth quarter defensive rotation, in particular, their reputation as a floorboard-burning team took a serious hit.

Jordan Crawford’s three-point play with 32.5 seconds left had just cut the Charlotte lead to two points (85-83). In the Celtics’ subsequent scramble to get a stop, the ball hit the floor three times. A Bobcat won the hustle battle each time, finally culminating in an Al Jefferson drive with 17 seconds left.

“We won one loose ball,” said the plain-spoken Gerald Wallace, who started his postgame address by saying he didn’t want to talk about the game.

As usual, though, the Celtics forward identified the problem immediately.

“I think they got all the offensive rebounds,” he said. “All of the plays that don’t show up on the stat sheet they won. It wasn’t even close. There are prime examples right there at the end. We trapped at halfcourt and they always seemed to come up with (the ball).”

The offensive rebound total was almost an even split, 12 for Charlotte and 10 for the Celtics.

But the Bobcats showed their edge in other ways, like a 14-8 advantage in second-chance points. Team rebounds, another good indication of a team’s hustle, went to the Bobcats by a 12-4 margin.

Though Jefferson, the former Celtic, had the most obvious impact with a 22-point, 11-rebound double-double, perhaps the most confounding number was this — Charlotte won by six points despite shooting only 36.6 percent from the floor.

The Celtics, much chillier than in their last two games, only shot 37.7 percent.

But it wasn’t the misses that hurt them.

“We didn’t do our job in the first half. Coach emphasized packing the paint and we didn’t do that, so they got a lot of layups,” said Courtney Lee. “Down the stretch we had a couple of turnovers, Jefferson had a put-back at a crucial time in the game. Those are the things that came back to haunt us.

“We didn’t get one loose ball,” he said. “They beat us to all of them, and that was the game. It was definitely frustrating. Once you get close you need one more stop, and when you can’t get it, it’s frustrating.”

Loose balls weren’t the only problem.

Offensive fouls by Kelly Olynyk and Jeff Green in the last eight minutes hurt badly. Olynyk’s charge came with the Bobcats lead cut to three (76-73). Green got to the line on the next Celtics possession, but missed both free throws with the same score on the board.

Green’s bullish drive into the paint roughly two minutes later also came in the face of a three-point deficit (78-75), but was far costlier.

Anthony Tolliver answered with his third trey of the game for an 81-75 Charlotte lead with 5:37 left.

Green and Crawford each made amends with back-to-back three-point plays, the latter cutting the deficit to 85-83 with 32.5 seconds left.

But when the Celtics created further chances by knocking the ball loose, they were unable to finish off any of those defensive plays.

“I thought they were just quicker to the basketball all night, in every which way, and I thought they did a great job right out of the gate establishing a tone of the way the game was going to be played and it was hard for us to manage that as we moved forward,” said Celtics coach Brad Stevens. “I’ve been through not a lot of NBA games but a lot of basketball games, and there are certain games where you feel like the other team has got you a little bit of a stranglehold, and it’s going to be hard to overcome it because of the way the game was going. That’s kind of what the game was telling you at the start of the game. They had their way most of the night.”