The Celtics [team stats] are the best road team in the NBA for a reason.
They must hate their home life.
How else to explain that the Celtics, in the fallout from last night’s 99-90 loss to Dallas, now have booted seven home games, including their past three to Dallas, Chicago and Atlanta.
But this home-front slide isn’t so easily separated from how the Celtics conduct business on the road, according to Doc Rivers.
“It’s not that teams are afraid to go into this building, or that building,” the coach said. “It’s a big game for them to come in here. It’s our duty to come out and have an amazing performance to make them think twice about that, and we’re not doing that.
“I would take the (27-12 overall) record. I’m just not taking the way we’re playing.”
That critique does not differentiate between locations.
“I don’t look at it as being home,” Ray Allen said. “I just look at the game in general. Third quarter, we came out and we didn’t have great energy. We have to put together 48 minutes if we want to be successful for a longer period of time.”
Issue No. 1 was a problem that every team faces at some point during the season - be it Rasheed Wallace, Glen Davis or Brian Scalabrine, no one had a solution for Dirk Nowitzki.
That realization took an ugly form once Wallace, whistled for his fourth foul on a charge with 5:16 remaining in the third quarter, left the game.
Nowitzki, on the way to a strafing 37-point performance that didn’t include one 3-point attempt, responded with nine straight points in a 15-3 Dallas run. The Celtics, who led by as many as 11, trailed by seven points by the end of the run.
A 14-0 fourth-quarter burst by the Mavs, this time driven by back-to-back treys from Jason Kidd and Jason Terry and fueled by the Celtics turning the ball over four times in five possessions, pinned the Celtics even deeper.
Wallace, amazingly, was bothered by the call that sent him to the bench.
“There’s no tough defense (allowed) on him, so, of course, I get a lot of (expletive) calls,” Wallace said of the trouble he ran into covering Nowitzki. “That’s how the story goes. I don’t worry about it. We’ll see them again. I can’t remember what the fourth call was, there were so many bogus (calls). But we go down there in a month or so. There will be retribution.”
That’s provided last night’s sins - poor transition defense especially - are eventually purged.
“We’ve got to understand that we’re a defensive team first, regardless of who we put on the floor at the end of the night,” said Paul Pierce [stats], who scored a team-high 24 points. “That’s regardless of if we shoot the ball well or not. We are a defensive team, and that’s what we have to continue to understand with the guys that are out.
“That’s something that is never going to change about this team. Right now, we are playing in spurts defensively. It’s going to be tough if we don’t start to develop some consistency on that end of the court.”
Instead, the Celtics [team stats] were at their most lenient in the second half, when the Mavericks shot a smooth 66.7 percent, including an 80 percent third quarter. Nor did Nowitzki slow down following his third-quarter run. He followed up a 13-point third with a nine-point fourth.
At his hottest, in a stretch of the third and into the fourth, Nowitzki scored 15 of Dallas’ 21 points.
“I don’t think it’s a pattern, except that we’re playing poorly at home right now,” Rivers said. “And we have to fix that. We will. When will be the question.”
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