Jaylen Brown offers wild reason why Celtics lost big to Wizards

Jaylen Brown had wild reasoning why the Boston Celtics had their three-game win streak snapped by the Wizards, 130-111, on March 28: the Washington D.C. traffic — something that sounds crazy at first but certainly resonates for anyone who has driven through the DMV region.

“We’ve been playing good ball the last couple weeks,” Brown prefaced before saying, “(Tuesday), we just throw it away, get ready for the next one. It was a weird game. Traffic kind of messed everything up, threw everybody off.”

Brown, though, ultimately did take responsibility on behalf of the Celtics for the loss. “No excuse,” he said. “We gotta be better, starting with me. We’ve been playing good basketball, just get back to it.”

Joe Mazzulla calls Wizards loss an off-night for the Boston Celtics

Boston Celtics head coach Joe Mazzulla chalked the loss in the nation’s capital up to being an off-night for his team to reporters in the post-game scrum.

“We didn’t do the small things that we did in the Spurs game,” Mazzulla said. “In the San Antonio game, they weren’t scoring in transition. They weren’t scoring on offensive rebounds or fouls. And tonight, when we’re really good, we manage the game well. We don’t let them do that. So, it was a combination. It was just one of those nights. Very rarely has that happened to our team. Just one of those off nights.”

In particular, Mazzulla called out his team not getting back up the floor after misses and turnovers on Monday night.

“Transition defense waned,” Mazzulla said. “I think we gave around 20 points in transition in the first half. … You let a team score early and often like that, especially in the first half, you give them a chance to get going and puts you in a tough spot and we weren’t able to recover.”