Before the Celtics and Warriors tipped off Monday afternoon, Steve Kerr took a moment to reassure Boston fans disillusioned by their team’s recent struggles.
Golden State’s head coach told reporters at Chase Center he “wouldn’t worry” about the defending champs, who fumbled away a winnable game against Atlanta two nights earlier and have not played to their elite potential over the last month-plus.
Come playoff time, Kerr predicted, the Celtics will be just fine.
The postseason still is more than three months away, but Boston looked much more like a championship front-runner on Monday, eviscerating an injury-depleted Golden State team 125-85 to open a four-game West Coast trip.
“They had some poor shooting, but I thought we were pretty intentional on the things that led to winning against them,” Celtics head coach Joe Mazzulla told reporters postgame.
The Warriors were playing without four regulars, including longtime starting forward Draymond Green (calf). Jonathan Kuminga, Golden State’s third-leading scorer, also was unavailable, as were rotation backups Brandin Podziemski and Kyle Anderson.
Stephen Curry was active after spraining his ankle Saturday. He was the only Warriors player to score more than 15 points, finishing with 18 on 6-of-16 shooting.
The Celtics were at full strength, with big men Kristaps Porzingis and Al Horford both returning after sitting out Saturday’s home loss to the Hawks for rest purposes. Porzingis, who’s consistently impressed since his most recent injury layoff, had 18 points and seven rebounds as part of a balanced Boston scoring effort that exploded after halftime.
“He’s been really physical on both ends of the floor for us lately,” Mazzulla told reporters, “and just his growth is big for us.”
Six Celtics scored in double figures, with Jayson Tatum leading the way with 22 points, nine rebounds, seven assists and two steals. Jaylen Brown finished with 17 points, with Payton Pritchard and Sam Hauser adding 14 and 11, respectively, off the bench. Derrick White provided three of Boston’s nine blocks and one of its eight steals, and Jrue Holiday (10 points) went 4-for-5 from the floor.
Boston opened the game with an 8-0 run fueled by two Porzingis 3-pointers, but Golden State scored 11 of the next 13 points to take the lead. Three of the Warriors’ five made field goals during that early rally came off offensive rebounds as the Celtics struggled to control the glass.
A Curry three put Golden State ahead for the first time. But when the future Hall of Famer headed to the bench 3 1/2 minutes later, his team’s offense vanished. The Celtics closed the first quarter on a 14-1 run to stretch their lead to double digits.
The shorthanded Warriors went more than seven consecutive minutes without a made field goal, with Curry off the floor for roughly half of that drought. They didn’t make their second 3-pointer until the 7:20 mark of the second quarter after starting 1-for-16 from distance.
The Celtics also weren’t efficient from 3-point range in the first half (7-for-24; 29.2%), but they went 15-for-22 inside the arc and led by as many as 19 points. Golden State’s 39 first-half points were the second-fewest by a Celtics opponent this season, ahead of only Toronto in a game the Raptors went on to lose by 54.
Boston couldn’t quite match that margin of victory, nor the 44-point shellacking it handed the Warriors last March. But it wasn’t far off.
After their erratic first half, the Celtics went 8-for-12 from three during a dominant, 43-point third quarter. Those came from seven different players, with Tatum making two and Holiday, Brown, Porzingis, Pritchard, Hauser and White all hitting one apiece.
The Celtics also went 8-for-11 in the paint in the quarter, consistently finding ways to attack inside.
By the end of the third, the score was 97-63 Celtics. Four minutes later, after another flurry that featured threes by Pritchard and Hauser, it was 107-68, and the night was over for Boston’s starters. Xavier Tillman, Jordan Walsh, Neemias Queta, Jaden Springer and Baylor Scheierman all got extended looks at the Celtics salted away a 40-point rout.
Walsh, who’s shuffled in and out of Mazzulla’s rotation this season, went 2-for-3 on 3-point attempts in his eight minutes of action. Scheierman also hit a three and grabbed three rebounds in his seventh career NBA appearance. The first-round draft pick has spent most of his rookie season developing in the G League.
The goal now for the Celtics will be maintaining this momentum as they begin the Los Angeles leg of their Western trip (at Clippers on Wednesday; at Lakers on Thursday). Doing so has proven difficult of late. Since Dec. 15, Boston’s record in games after wins is 2-7, with just one winning streak of any length during that span.
The Celtics’ winter swoon has been neither surprising nor startling to watch for Kerr. He has plenty of experience with Boston’s current challenge of repeating as NBA champions, having successfully defended one Warriors title and reaching the Finals after two others.
No NBA team has won back-to-back championships since Golden State did so in 2017-18, and that squad, like these Celtics, was not a regular-season juggernaut. It finished 58-24, seven games out of first place in the West, before blitzing through a playoff run that featured just one series longer than five games.
After Monday’s win, Boston is on pace to win 57 games and trails first-place Cleveland by 6.5 games in the East.
“The Celtics (have) been at it for seven, eight years, playing deep into the postseason,” Kerr told reporters. “It’s not like this was a brand-new team last season winning it all. They’ve had to fight through a lot of difficult seasons. So (it’s) perfectly natural for them to have a little bit of an emotional hangover and maybe not be at their best game after game. I’ve seen that a million times in this league.
“But what I would expect is, come playoff time, they’ll be ready to roll. They’ve got guys in their primes, well-oiled machine, well-coached. They know who they are. So I wouldn’t worry about the Celtics if I were one of their fans. This is normal.”
