So…that wasn’t very fun. The Boston Celtics took on the revamped small-ball Houston Rockets for their final regular-season matchup and, despite playing better than they did in the first contest, found themselves flummoxed by the Rockets’ switchability and physical intensity, finally collapsing in the overtime they forced. So how’d it go down?
A tale of two halves
In the first half of this game, the Celtics were the dominant team in all possible ways—defense, offense and overall effort. In the second, things flipped entirely. The way that lengthy Houston defenders like P.J. Tucker, Robert Covington and Danuel House could press Boston’s offensive sets into bad, jagged arrhythmias resulted in clunky ISO-ball stuff.