On their way to winning the 2024 NBA championship, the Boston Celtics won 80 of the 101 total games they played, a winning percentage just a shade under .800. Through the first 25 games of this season, the Celtics won 20. Again, that’s a winning percentage of .800. For that matter, in the 2024-2025 preseason, the Celtics won four of their five exhibition games — a winning percentage of, yes, .800.
In other words, since Celtics president of basketball operations Brad Stevens made the moves that brought center Kristaps Porzingis and point guard Jrue Holday to Boston prior to the 2023-2024 season, the Celtics have been a team that could be reliably counted upon to win 80 percent of its games.
Until now.
Celtics Have Been a .500 Team For a Full Month
Since defeating the Detroit Pistons in game 25 on December 12, the Celtics have played 15 games, winning only eight and losing seven. They have barely managed to be a .500 team over the past month, a sorry stretch culminating in Wednesday night’s 13-point defeat, 110-97, to the Toronto Raptors — a team that came into the game with only nine wins in 40 tries, the second-worst record in the NBA.
What happened? John Karalis, a Celtics beat reporter for the past two decades who now hosts the daily Locked On Celtics podcast, analyzed the game. His conclusion? The disheartening defeat was the “worst loss of the season” for the defending champs — not as much for their poor play but for the lackluster, at best, effort Boston’s players appeared to exhibit against the struggling Raptors.
“Maybe this is a rock bottom loss, not just because of how they played, but I think everybody understands that this one felt different. This one felt like they didn’t even care, like they didn’t even care to try in the second half,” Karalis said on Thursday’s Locked On podcast. “Not even just the second half, by the way. Long stretches of the first half were awful, and there’s just a part of me that that was watching this game like, ‘Come on, come on guys, come on! At least show me something. At least show me that you give a crap about this.’”
But it wasn’t just one podcaster who questioned the Celtics effort. Porzingis himself, normally the Celtics player with the most consistently upbeat and optimistic demeanor, had harsh words for his teammates — presumably including himself — after the Toronto fiasco which came just three days after the Celtics barely escaped with a one-point win over the New Orleans Pelicans, a team with only eight wins on the season.
Porzingis Lashes Out at Lack of ‘Spirit’
The six-word message to his fellow Celtics delivered by Porzingis: “There’s just no spirit, no personality.”
In fact, in his post-game comments, an uncharacteristically dour Porzingis repeated at least twice that the Celtics played without spirit or personality.
“I think we played with no spirit, with no personality. It’s just a weak performance from us, honestly. We just play with no personality right now,” the 7’2″, 29-year-old native of Latvia told reporters. “We just individually have to look at ourselves like, where we can improve, what we need to do better, are we fit? Are we feeling good? Are we locked in mentally? And then try to fix some of the stuff that we have going on.”
Porzingis’s comments came after a game in which four of the five starters posted game scores — a measure of player efficiency — below the NBA average of 15. The one starter who came in above the average was Porzingis, whose game score was an underwhelming 15.4.
Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown, the two Celtics superstars whose combined SuperMax salaries consume just under 60 percent of the team’s 2024-2025 payroll, posted game scores of 13.9 for Tatum and a shocking 3.5 for Brown. Derrick White, whose 47 blocked shots is the most for any NBA guard this season, ended up with a negative game score of -1.7.
