In the initial weeks of the 2023-24 NBA season, the Boston Celtics appeared to be making progress in terms of maturity as a ball club, demonstrating resilience and a strong mindset, especially in crunch time. However, recent contests have seen a regression in their mindset, particularly during a road trip against supposedly inferior opponents.
While they secured victories, cracks in their performance became evident, and Celtics head coach Joe Mazzulla addressed those cracks after one such loss, to the Orlando Magic at Amway Center on Friday afternoon. “I can’t have the expectation of perfection that we’re always going to play well,” said Mazzulla via the Boston Herald’s Steve Hewitt. “It’s not reality. There are 82 of these things.”
“It’s easy to lump the group of guys that we have coming back as like, they’ve been around, but every team needs to learn different things and go through different stuff, and it’s easy to say you want to be a certain type of team, and then it just gets harder and harder to live that way,” he added.
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“And so, the standard is very high for us,” suggested the Celtics coach. “The guys in the locker room set a high standard for themselves, and we’re not always going to meet it.”
“So I understand why a game is going to go like this. It’s not going to be the only time, but I don’t have to be happy about it.”
Whether this becomes a blip in that 82-game season or a trend depends on how the Celtics respond to it. Mazzulla is correct — perfection is a goal, not a status, after all. But failures grow the same way successes do — by repetition.
Celtics Lab 228: A Boston Celtics Thanksgiving (round) table with Bobby Krivitsky and Jack Simone https://t.co/lr5UQ6XdBg via @thecelticswire
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