I suppose I'm asking for too much, but I didn't like to see the letdown and I didn't like to see how much the struggles in this game resembled last season's struggles.
Here's a weird stat that says a lot about this game. With under 2 minutes to go in the third quarter, Sam Hauser had a pair of back to back steals. These were the first 2 Celtic steals of the game. They opened with 34 straight minutes without one and finished the game with 4. They also had 6 blocks in the game: three coming early in the first quarter and only one total in the second and third quarters combined.
Brooklyn's defense played aggressively and had some success throwing double teams at Tatum, in ways that looked pretty similar to what Miami did to Celtics deficient ballhandlers.
Also, with Holiday here and playing well, why are we defauling to having Tatum bring the ball up late in games? I guess it worked.
With 5:09 left in the half, Brooklyn was trailing by only one point, and the Celtics finally tuned it on, outscoring Brooklyn by 11 points (21-10) over the rest of the half. This was the starters after the bench had struggled. But, then they came out flat in the third quarter (another 2022-23 problem), allowing Brooklyn to cut the lead to 3 with a 13-4 run that made it 74-71 with 8:15 left in the third. After this the Celtics tightened up their defense and maintained their 3 point lead to the end of the quarter. In the 4th, Brooklyn managed to cut the lead to 1 with 7:47 to go, outscoring Brooklyn 28-19 the rest of the way.
The bench was terrible in the first half, but pretty effective without putting numbers up in the second half. Except for Kornet, who was effective in both halves. In Q4, Mazzulla let Kornet and Hauser play pretty deep into the quarter before going to all starters for the stretch run. (They each started the quarter, played the first 6:50, and were each +8. Kornet had 5 points, 3 rebounds and a steal, while Hauser had nothing but a missed 3, but they played well. In his 4 minutes in Q3, Hauser hit a 3, had a rebound, and had the first 2 Celtic steals of the game.