“Winning ugly” is typically a phrase used when a team doesn’t statistically play well but still manages to fight their way to a W anyway. The Boston Celtics’ 122-102 win over the Washington Wizards was ugly.
It was also a whomping.
Usually, you don’t get to see both things at once, but I suppose that it’s #DifferentHere.
Boston’s start to this game was the polar opposite of everything we saw from them on Opening Night. They lacked energy, the ball didn’t move, and they found themselves in a battle with the Jordan Poole-led Wizards.
Despite all of that, they still finished the opening frame with a one-point lead over the hosts. They can thank Jayson Tatum for that, as he got off to another hot start in this one with 14 first-quarter points.
After another period, the Cs were shooting just 46.7% from the field (not the worst, but not great by their standards) and had turned the ball over six times, which was double their total on Tuesday.
“I expected a little bit of a (low), just because of coming off of such a high,” Joe Mazzulla said of his team’s lackluster start. “The emotion was going to take us a little while to settle in… It just took us a little while to get acclimated to the speed of the game.”
Oh yeah, and their lead was in double digits at the break.
Once play resumed, it continued to grow all the way up to 32 points.
Sure, there’s a layer to this where Washington is just an objectively bad NBA team. Boston still adjusted their intensity on the fly, made better decisions, and played to their strengths.
From the top down, the squad did a great job of pounding the offensive glass, where they finished the game with 19 second-chance points on 12 offensive rebounds.
Four of those came from Neemias Queta, who brought great energy off of Boston’s bench. He tallied 12 points and seven boards in 14 minutes.
Mazzulla credited the big man after the win, reminding reporters that he was a key contributor in a few different wins last season.
He wasn’t the only one, either. Cs guard Derrick White shouted Queta out too, saying that it felt like he grabbed “every offensive rebound.”
White says Queta “seems to get every offensive rebound.”
Saw him thinking too much last year and now he’s just playing.
— Bobby Manning (@RealBobManning) October 25, 2024
Listen, this isn’t the type of win that you’ll be telling your kids or grandkids about someday. But, it was a great example of how Boston plays and works best as a team. They parlayed Queta’s hustle and great energy with better ball movement and more concentrated defense to change the entire course of this game.
Boston’s star pairing of Tatum and Jaylen Brown (happy birthday) had their respective moments, too, but there is something truly satisfying about seeing a team come together and collectively decide to play the right way to take control.
It was also a different kind of special to watch Wizards not named Jordan Poole shoot a combined 1-25 from beyond the arc.
