The Celtics are learning they can’t just turn it on when it matters

All the bad habits of this disappointing regular season have caught up with them.

The Boston Celtics find themselves in a dreadful 3-1 playoff deficit. After stealing Game 1 in Milwaukee, the Celtics lost to the Bucks in Milwaukee, then in Boston, then in Boston, again. A Celtics team that swept an undermanned Indiana squad in the first round now has their back against the wall, facing playoff odds only 10 teams in NBA history have ever overcome.

Boston wreaks of a team that coasted through the regular season, thinking it could “turn it on” or “flip the switch” in the playoffs. As Kyrie Irving said in late February:

“I can’t wait for all this other B.S. about the regular season, keep getting better, talking over and over and over again about what we can do to keep getting better playing in the regular season,” Irving said. “I just want to be at the highest level playing.”

It doesn’t work like that. It rarely does.

There’s a precedent for this. Irving’s old team, the Cleveland Cavaliers, made four straight trips to the NBA Finals from 2015 to 2018, but they never looked like championship contenders from start to finish. The Cavaliers were terrible on defense and often stagnant and disorganized on offense. But they had the best player in the world in LeBron James, a generational talent capable of flipping the switch ‘on’ in a moment’s notice, dragging the rest of his team to the top of the basketball universe with him.

The Boston Celtics find themselves in the Cavaliers’ shoes, attempting to defy the odds set by a disappointing regular season. But the Celtics don’t have the best player in the world; in fact, they may be playing against him. And the Celtics don’t have the luxury of “turning it on” now in the playoffs. They should have done so long ago.

There were two ways to view the Celtics entering this season. On one hand, this is a team that fell one game shy of the NBA Finals without Kyrie Irving and Gordon Hayward. Bringing back all that talent should have paved their way back to a deep postseason run and a dance with the Warriors for an NBA championship.

But on the flip side of the same coin, this is a team that almost made the NBA Finals without two of their best players. Re-integrating them into the lineup threatened to be uncomfortable and take time, no matter which way the pie was sliced.

In the end, that’s exactly what happened. Irving’s return reduced a once-Scary Terry Rozier to anything but. Hayward’s return from that gruesome injury created a logjam at the wing, with both Jaylen Brown and Jayson Tatum enduring role changes. The Celtics now find themselves outmatched, heading to Giannis Antetokounmpo’s home court with their season on the line. Milwaukee has been preparing for this game the entire season. Boston, after losing two imperative games on their own home court, looks like a team still trying to figure it out.

Of course, if shots go in, this conversation is different. In Game 4, Irving shot 7-of-22 from the field, Tatum shot 6-of-14, Marcus Smart shot 1-of-7 in his return from injury, and both Hayward and Rozier shot 1-of-5. But this was a game begging for Boston to blow Milwaukee out of the water with one timely run.

It was also a game begging for Irving to take over. He’s the player who requested to be traded from LeBron James to build a legacy of his own elsewhere. Through four games against Milwaukee, Irving is shooting 36.9 percent from the field. He’s admitted he needed to be better after each of his team’s losses, but has been unable to deliver as the focal point of Milwaukee’s defensive game plan.

Boston now finds itself with unthinkable odds stacked against them. The Celtics tried to turn it on in the playoffs, like LeBron James turned it on in Cleveland. That didn’t work for two reasons: The Celtics don’t have James, and they’re playing a Bucks team that’s been turned on all year long.

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