BOSTON -- Kyrie Irving, having just stiff-armed a question wondering if the Boston Celtics' Christmas Day loss to the Washington Wizards was the team's most disappointing of the season, immediately found himself blitzed with a follow-up that he has heard repeatedly over the past three weeks.
"What's wrong with the Celtics?"
The same Boston team that ripped off 16 straight wins as part of a 22-4 start has stumbled its way through December, dropping six of its last 12 games. It's not just the results; Boston hasn't looked like the same team in that span.
"I'm just going to make it clear, guys: I know [losing is] going to come with a lot of questions about the difference in our team and stuff like that," Irving said. "To clear it all up, we'll be fine."
"I know everybody else in the world is going to hit the panic button, so it doesn't make any sense for us to."
Celtics G Kyrie Irving, on Boston's rough December stretch
The hard-to-ruffle Irving then calmly offered a state of the union, acknowledged that Boston hasn't played up to its standards of late, alluded to the injuries and unrelenting schedule the team has endured and suggested it was on him as one of the team's leaders to help get the Celtics back on track.
"It hasn't been one of the best stretches for us, but we have a resilient group," Irving said. "That right there is enough for us to continue to go on and make progress in the right direction of what we want to become."
It'll be a battle of teams trying to dust themselves off when the Houston Rockets visit the Celtics on Thursday night at TD Garden for a national TV battle. Houston has lost three in a row after a stretch in which it won 20 out of 21 games, including 14 in a row.
For the Rockets, their struggles are alarmingly easy to diagnose: Houston has been pretty much unstoppable when Chris Paul plays and vulnerable when he doesn't.
For the Celtics, it's a bit more complicated. But there is undeniably a fatigue factor at play for a team that clocked its league-high 38th game with Wednesday's road win over the Charlotte Hornets.
For all the talk about how the league has eased the schedule this season, the Celtics haven't quite seen the benefits because of a front-loaded slate that will see them play half of their 82 games by Jan. 3. That's 41 games in 79 days. The Celtics will play their final 41 games over a much more agreeable 97-day span.
The culprit? A trip to London next month that's part of a stretch in which Boston will play just one game -- against the Philadelphia 76ers on Jan. 11 -- in nine days. The travel notwithstanding, it'll be a much-deserved and much-needed chance for Boston to catch its breath.
While coach Brad Stevens and his players have refused to use the schedule as a crutch, one look at Boston's numbers since early December hint at the impact:
The Celtics have also played a league-high 24 clutch games, or games in which the score is within five points in the final five minutes. Boston went 13-4 in those games to start the season, and its clutch ratings during that span were absurd on both offense (127.4) and defense (102.3). Over the past three weeks, Boston's ratings have plummeted, including a ghastly 132.5 defensive rating while going 4-3 in clutch games in that span. Maybe even more noticeable: Boston's rebound percentage in those seven games is an impossibly low 36.7 percent overall (second worst in that span, in front of only New Orleans).
Boston's Christmas Day loss to the Wizards spotlighted how tired legs and a lack of consistent execution has hindered the Celtics lately. Boston surged ahead early in the fourth quarter behind rookie Jayson Tatum and had TD Garden rocking with the Celtics out front with under seven minutes to play.
Not only would the Wizards, mediocre in clutch time this season, connect on eight of their final 12 shots, but they also chased down four offensive rebounds. No Celtics player gathered a defensive rebound over the final 6:56 of the game (Boston had one team rebound, and Al Horford had an offensive carom).
The Celtics' play in clutch time was a mess, with multiple mental lapses and defensive miscues, hardly the crisp execution that propelled them during their winning streak.
As poorly as the Celtics have played in recent weeks, they've also had moments of brilliance. Stevens said Boston's win over Chicago last Saturday might have been the team's best overall performance of the season. On Wednesday, Boston posted its first wire-to-wire victory of the year in Charlotte, although it nearly fumbled away a 20-point lead and the Hornets surged within one before the Celtics raced away in the fourth quarter.
Boston, with its undersized nature, is not going to be an elite rebounding team. But the Celtics showed early in the year that, with a stout defense, they can mingle among the better teams on the glass. They just have to find their way back to defensive consistency.
The Celtics, once projected by ESPN's Basketball Power Index to push for 60 wins, now forecast at 56.4. The Toronto Raptors, who briefly surged ahead in the East standings earlier this week, currently project to finish ahead of Boston at 57.4 wins, thanks in part to Toronto's elite offensive BPI rating. The Raptors are third overall in the NBA behind the Golden State Warriors and Houston, while Boston is fourth. Despite recent struggles, the Celtics remain second in defensive BPI behind only the Warriors.
BPI's strength of schedule metric suggests that Boston has played the fourth-easiest schedule in the league this season, but the game schedule has seemingly upped the degree of difficulty a bit.
There's a light at the end of the tunnel for the Celtics. After Thursday's game against the Rockets, Boston will have consecutive days off for the first time in a month. The Celtics will hold their first honest-to-goodness practice since Nov. 29 (and Stevens said he thinks the team's last practice that involved contact was actually further back in late October).
Maybe that's why Stevens seemed more excited about that Dec. 30 off-day than, you know, celebrating Christmas.
"There's probably not a day that I'm looking forward to more than Dec. 30 when we practice," Stevens said before a game in Indiana earlier this month. "But we have to find our rhythm and find our groove through playing. ... That's just where we are. The good news, I will say, about this is we're going to have a lot of information by the time January rolls around -- who we are, what we're capable of, what we need to tweak, what we need to change."
Not everything will be fixed in one off-day session. And Stevens is even more eager for the downtime in which he can fully analyze Boston's play during the London break.
Amid Boston's struggles, some will wonder whether the shine has worn off. Some pegged the Celtics as the new kings of the East during their hot streak, but as the Cleveland Cavaliers await the season debut of Isaiah Thomas, the narrative has reverted to most wondering if Boston's young roster has enough firepower to truly compete with the three-time defending East champs.
With the likes of Stevens and Irving guiding this team, Boston won't get caught up in outside perception. Stevens told anyone who would listen during Boston's 16-game winning streak that the team wasn't as good as its record suggested, as the Celtics had an unhealthy habit of having to rally from double-digit deficits to win many of those games.
Uneasy Celtics fans are clamoring for president of basketball operations Danny Ainge to utilize the $8.4 million disabled player exception the team has because of Gordon Hayward's absence. Ainge has resisted the temptation, pointing out that the team is neither impressed with what's available at the moment nor in a rush to overreact to small stretches of inconsistent play.
The Celtics have until March 12 to utilize the exception, allowing them to use it as a chip before the February trade deadline (it could be paired with a draft pick to pluck an impact player) or simply wait until the buyout market gets stocked in early March.
If rebounding remains an issue, the Celtics can target a rebounder (Dallas Mavericks center Nerlens Noel's name has been invariably invoked in that conversation) or, if Marcus Morris continues to deal with knee issues, they might seek a scoring wing.
For now, Boston's youngest players, such as Tatum and Jaylen Brown, are getting invaluable time to develop. That's a curse and a blessing for a team with aspirations of contending for a title. According to ESPN Stats & Information, you have to go back to the 1997-98 season to find the last time two Celtics players under the age of 21 averaged 30 or more minutes per game (Ron Mercer and Antoine Walker on a 36-win team).
Which is to say we won't know exactly what the Celtics are for a while. But despite the recent struggles, there are more encouraging signs than concerning ones. Maybe that's why Irving won't allow himself to get too riled up about a frustrating stretch.
"I know everybody else in the world is going to hit the panic button, so it doesn't make any sense for us to," Irving said last week. "Just consistently learning, that's what it's about, especially in a developing group like we have here. So it's not going to be perfect. There's going to be lulls and weeks where we go up and down.
"I've been saying it throughout the season, even when we had the strong start. It's part of the NBA schedule, part of getting better as a team."