NEW YORK — A distraught Hugo Gonzalez wandered through the Boston Celtics locker room late Friday night. He sulked over to complete his post-game media availability after a game that should have been a core memory for the 19-year-old.
Gonzalez made his NBA debut at Madison Square Garden as the Celtics squared off against the New York Knicks. A feat he undoubtedly worked for his entire life. Hours of practice, a meticulous work ethic, and years of nonstop grinding led to that exact moment. Hugo Gonzalez: NBA Player.
But Gonzalez didn’t seem to care. At all.
“I'm not having a great memory of this day, because we lost a game that we could have won,” Gonzalez said with a blank stare.
Roughly five months after the Celtics were bounced from the playoffs on the very same floor, they returned. But the revenge they so desperately wanted will have to wait. And it was all the fault of a disastrous second quarter.
These Celtics need time to grow
For the second straight game to open their season, the Celtics allowed a 42-point quarter. On Wednesday, it was the Philadelphia 76ers in the fourth. On Friday, it was the Knicks in the second.
“Back-to-back games where we gave ourselves a chance, but we had two 42-point quarters,” said Joe Mazzulla. “So, we got to clean that up.”
New York scored 34 of their 42 points off of second-chance opportunities (12), fast break chances (10), and free throws (12) alone.
All controllable areas in which the Celtics failed.
“The transition comes from a combination of not getting the offensive rebound,” said Mazzulla. “I think at one point, we only had five offensive rebounds. Live-ball turnovers. I think we had— I forget how many turnovers that we had in the game. And then obviously, the offensive rebounding. So, it's a combination of those three things. You have to clean those up. Those are areas that you can control. Those are areas that just require effort and discipline, and building the habit of that.”
Everything is connected in a basketball game. New York scored 10 fast-break points in the second quarter, but how many of those would have been avoided had Boston crashed harder on the offensive glass? They only had one offensive rebound in the second.
The Knicks shot 12-of-12 from the charity stripe, but that could have been a moot point had Boston’s risk-oriented defense remained disciplined in its process. New York’s transition opportunities could have been cut down had the Celtics played their new brand of up-tempo basketball more consistently and earned better quality shots.
If the Celtics can’t stick to their principles, then the entire game is destined to go sideways.
“I think, if you look at those four categories—defensive rebounding, offensive rebounding, forcing turnovers, not turning it over—we probably have a better chance at controlling three out of the four of those with our effort and our ability to control those things,” said Mazzulla. “And so we got to fight for those.”
This Celtics season was always going to be different. Even before Jayson Tatum ruptured his Achilles on the very same MSG floor Boston visited once again on Friday night, the second-apron was inevitable.
Trades were fated to destroy the 2024 NBA Championship Celtics that had existed for a measly two seasons. It quickly became painfully clear that Kristaps Porzingis and Jrue Holiday were rentals, and the 2025-26 campaign would see a shift.
Tatum going down turned that shift into an all-out pivot.
The slow-paced, mismatch-oriented Celtics are gone. The risk-averse, no-foul Celtics are in the past. In their place is a fast, risky, frantic group that Mazzulla has carefully trained throughout camp and the preseason.
But nothing compares to regular-season basketball.
“We're just trying to figure out exactly what our identity is, and I think we're trying to play to a certain way that we know we're capable of, but it's going to be hard to put a full 48 together right away at the start of the season,” said Sam Hauser.
“So, it's just kind of a learning curve, a little bit. But we've gotten better in the first two games, and hopefully it can just keep carrying over to the next game and the next game and the next game.”
Boston’s rebranding has taken shape in multiple ways.
There are new faces in town: Gonzalez, Josh Minott, Anfernee Simons, Chris Boucher, and more. There are faces who didn’t play much last year, earning new opportunities: Neemias Queta, Xavier Tillman, and others.
Even for those who earned regular minutes for the Celtics of recent years, a new style of play means new everything. The brand of basketball they have come to know is gone.
Yet outside of that new system, the issues that have hindered Boston through its first two games are preventable.
“You have to execute the details and the discipline,” said Mazzulla. ”I mean, maybe playing in a different system for some of them, but no. They're just details that we just- You have to build the habit of executing that discipline.”
And even though the end result was the same in both games—a loss—the Celtics took a step in the right direction against the Knicks.
“If you look at a 48-minute game, no one has played a perfect 48-minute game,” said Mazzulla. “I thought last game maybe we played 12 to 16 minutes of the way that we need to play on both ends. Tonight, I thought it was closer to 24. So, we just have to continue to get that number up as high as possible, and it's just the effort and the details and the discipline.”
That’s all they are focused on.
“When I said we're focusing on the details, it's not a process, but something that is going to be for all 82 games, said Gonzalez. “We want to have our basics and then focus on our details, because at the end of the day, details is what wins the games. So, basically, having those details, rotations, personnel, whatever, to make plays and win the game at the end.”
Details and discipline have never been more important for the Celtics because their margin for error is as slim as ever.
For the better part of a decade, Boston has been a top dog in the Eastern Conference. In the NBA. Title favorites year in and year out, six conference finals appearances, two Finals births, and a banner to top it all off.
Those same Celtics don’t exist anymore. At least, not right now.
“Every game is a fight,” said Jaylen Brown. “Every game, you got to fight.”
Perfecting that fight is next.
“We had a lot of chances tonight, even though New York felt like they were in control. We were still in striking distance,” Brown said. “We make a couple of shots, get a couple of rebounds, and some other plays go our way, we're right in the game.
“So, we just got to keep our head up and get better every single game. I got some stuff that I see that I can work on and see how to get other guys open and find them easier looks. So, I'm learning too. I'm learning in this new role. I'm trying to find ways to make everybody around me better.”
Expecting Boston to immediately gel is an unrealistic concept. There’s a reason teams like the Knicks, Cleveland Cavaliers, and Oklahoma City Thunder are as successful as they are: Continuity.
If there’s one thing the Celtics don’t have this year, it’s continuity.
Though that’s not completely true—four of Boston’s core rotation members are still in place, and Mazzulla is still leading a near-identical coaching staff—the Celtics’ shift in identity counteracts that.
Those same players and same coaches are having to learn new concepts and new styles that differ from all of the information they had worked so hard ot perfect for the past two seasons.
Unfortunately, the NBA waits for no one.
“Well, we're 0-2, so it starts there, I would say,” Mazzulla said when asked about the need for urgency. “And the second piece is, there are different ways to be great, and easing into an identity, understanding who we are and who we can be, we want to get to that faster than other teams can. I think that's being an advantage, and I think we have an ability to do that.
“So, we've shown signs of learning about that in our film sessions and our practices, and again, we showed 12 minutes better. I felt a sense of urgency to getting to that identity faster.”
And the Celtics need to learn on the fly.
“I think it's pretty urgent,” said Hauser. “The past two years, we were able to kind of figure out how we want to play based off of just the amount of established guys we had, and even if we didn't play our best one night, we were gonna win the majority of our games.
“Our team looks different this year. It's not always gonna be like that. We're gonna have to be gritty, pick up full-court, trap, try to get steals, turnovers, and play fast on offense. So, it's just trying to figure out the new way of life, I guess.”
Yet, almost counterintuitively, the best way for Boston to press down the gas pedal of urgency may be to remain patient.
“It's both,” said Brown. “Patience and urgency.”
Learning how to thrive in their new system is a must. It’s an unavoidable fact. If the Celtics want any chance of putting a competitive product on the floor every night, they have to adapt. Hunt or become the hunted.
But that doesn’t happen overnight. And overanalyzing and pressing would only put a strain on the situation.
“This is a good test for us to kind of see where we're at,” said Brown. ”We're learning from every film sesh. I'm learning how to find guys and learning how to get guys going and etc. So, tonight we wasn't our best outing. We were a little bit out of sync. The spacing wasn't great. So, we just got to figure out how to put 48 minutes together.
“So, it's urgency, for sure, but it's also a patience with this group. There's a lot of new guys on our team who are figuring out how to be consistent and what our role is every single night.”
Losing isn’t something the Celtics are fond of. No team is, but for the winningest organization in NBA history, it leaves an especially gross taste in their mouths.
This is the first time the Celtics have begun their season 0-2 since Ime Udoka’s first (and only) year in town. This is a first in the Mazzulla era.
“You never want to lose,” Hauser said. “But we got 80 more. And I'm pretty confident that we're gonna start winning some big ones here. We had two really good opponents to start off with, but the standard hasn't changed. We want to win, we want to compete, and be the best. So, we just got to try to live up to that.”
The second quarter is the story from Friday night. ‘Knicks Utilize 42-Point Outburst in Second to Charge Past Celtics’ could be a headline in any major paper across NYC on Saturday morning.
But hidden next to that monstrosity are three other frames. Three other quarters in which the Celtics were not so quietly the better basketball team.
They won the first quarter by eight, the third quarter by three, and the fourth quarter by seven, with Gonzalez’s defense and intensity leading the way in the second half.
Boston allowed 22 points in the first, 18 in the third, and 23 in the fourth. Extrapolate that New York scoring pace across an entire game, and it would have been an 84-point showing.
The signs are there. The Celtics are learning. And they aren’t far away from fully taking this new style by the horns.
“No, we aren't,” said Hauser. "I mean, I think we played pretty well tonight. They just had a huge second quarter, and that was kind of the difference. But the other three quarters, I think we held them to 25 points or less in each of those quarters, and we were right there. It's just, if we clean up that same quarter, who knows what could happen?”
The Celtics aren’t used to losing. They never want to be. But there has been growth in their 0-2 start. And the signs of progress show a basketball team much, much greater than the sum of its parts.
They just have to prove it for a full 48 minutes. And that is its own challenge.w