The art of being terrible in the NBA

BOSTON -- Here is a series of pregame quotes. They are similar in sentiment if not tone. They are the words of coaches and players from opposing teams mired in what could charitably be called losing streaks, but would more accurately be described as mind-numbing exercises in habitual futility in which the same result gets played out night after night with frightening familiarity.

“Maybe I have not done a good job of recognizing that it is a process, because I’m not all that interested in a process even though that’s all I used to talk about.”

“I’m not very good with patience. It’s not a strength of mine.”

“If we could put our finger on it, we would have changed it by now. Any time you’re losing, there’s definitely a level of frustration. We’re just trying to focus on getting out of this funk. Sometimes it just takes that one game.”

“I’ve never been through it like this. Sometimes it just takes one to get over the hump and then all of a sudden, you’ve figured it out. I don’t think that’s how it works. I think you’ve got to do it every single night.”

Their words don’t mean that much. They are just token thoughts against the backdrop of the same old give and take night after night with the same bunch of scribes looking for something new to get them through the day.

They are what you get when one team had lost eight of nine, as in Boston’s case, and the other had lost nine in a row and 12 of 13, like Detroit. The takeaway, if there was any here, is that the NBA can be a cold, depressing place when losing becomes commonplace, especially when the method of defeat rarely changes. Like, what else are you supposed to say?

Processes and plans sound great in training camp and hold some currency through November when everyone is settling into the rhythms of a new campaign. But now it’s December and there comes a point when you have to break the cycle of losing before it consumes you and sends you spiraling back into the abyss of another lost season.

For the Celtics, it’s been an inability to hold leads in the fourth quarter. This has been a problem dating back to last season. They are a perimeter team that thrives when the setting is comfortable and regress when the game inevitably tightens up down the stretch. They lack a go-to guy, among other things, who can take over when things go wrong.

“I think sometimes we’re all looking for the other guy or deferring somewhat,” Stevens said. “We’ve got a lot of guys and we’re going to have to continue to do that by committee. It’s easy to point to the fourth quarters, but we have moments throughout the game where we play too un-solid and that catches up to us in the end.”

For the Pistons, it’s an inability to make shots. They rank dead last in field goal percentage and despite having three talented big men, they inexplicably get even worse the closer they get to the basket. Their defense isn’t great either, but it has improved somewhat. Not enough, however, to cover up their inability to score when breakdowns occur, as they did at various times against the Celtics.

“We weren’t helping on cuts and the whole thing,” Van Gundy said. “I mean it was better overall tonight but we had a couple of stretches in the game. We had one in the first half and one in the third quarter where we just, we lose it for a couple of minutes. When you are shooting 36 percent you don’t have the margin for error to do that. I mean look, honestly, every team has a couple of those stretches in games, OK, but it’s magnified with us because we don’t make shots.”

“They fought hard tonight, I mean you can’t fault them,” Van Gundy said. “They clearly haven’t given up at this point. I thought they fought hard. We just didn’t play well enough.”

Of all the words that were said, none were truer than those.

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