Celtics need more cowbell

Forty-eight minutes.

That’s the regulation length of an NBA basketball game and if you ask head coach Joe Mazzulla, it’s the complete length of time that his team needs to play Celtics basketball to win games.

Despite starting the season with two losses — a one-point heartbreaker at home to the 76ers and Friday’s thumping at Madison Square Garden — Mazzulla sees improvement.

“We did it twelve minutes last game and we probably did it twelve to twenty-four today, so we’re twelve minutes closer,” Mazzulla said after the Celtics outscored the Knicks 51-41 in the second half of their 105-95 loss.

Unlike seasons past where Boston could rely on their consistently stout defense and the more-than-often variable of their three-point shooting, this year, they have to win on the hard stuff. If your roster is littered with members of All-Defense teams and rim protectors three-deep on your bench, defense is a relative given. Sames goes with threes. If everybody up-and-down your lineups are competent shooters, it’s easy to generate threes.

But when neither of those are automatics, you have to succeed in the difficult to win games in the NBA. And you have to do it all the time to win a lot of games.

Against the Knicks, the Celtics forced twenty turnovers for 16 points, a number that they’ll need to regularly hit — if not exceed — for this chaos machine to work. However, playing that frantic pace is going to rack up fouls and with fouls, comes free throws. New York went to the line 25 times to Boston’s 15 trips in the 10-point loss.

“Again, some of those fouls are going to come. We also forced twenty turnovers, so some of those are going to come. There are situational ones that we have to get better at, whether it’s the ones that you have to clean up on a player’s tendencies. But again, we forced twenty turnovers and a little bit of that comes with it,” Mazzulla said after the game.

This year’s Celtics have drilled throughout training camp on making this a staple of their playstyle. Last season, Boston was just 25th in the league in generating offense off turnovers at 15.5 points per game, so they’ll have to turn it up to 11 as soon as possible.

“With the rebounding, we have to combat it in three ways: we have to be as physical as we can rebounding, we have to get offensive rebounds, and we have to force more turnovers,” Mazzulla continued. “There are moments of physicality defensively and we can be better at that and we gotta combat that with offensive rebounding and us forcing turnovers and us not turning it over. I think if you look at those four categories — defensive rebounding, offensive rebounding, forcing turnovers, and not turning it over — we probably have a better chance at controlling three out of the four with our effort and our ability to control those things. We gotta fight for those.”

Since the preseason games, rebounding has been an issue. With Kristaps Porzingis, Al Horford, and Luke Kornet now in Atlanta, Golden State, and San Antonio, their top-10 defensive rebounding frontcourt is gone. Mazzulla has stressed that rebounding is an effort thing and so far, the results have been mixed. The Celtics held the 76ers in check on Opening Night, allowing just ten offensive rebounds. But at Madison Square Garden, the Knicks, who led the league in 2023-2024 in offensive boards, grabbed 21 for 21 points on Friday.

After New York had four offensive rebounds in the first six-plus minutes of the game, Mazzulla yanked all five starters.

“It’s holding them accountable to the things that they can control. That’s a high, high standard. To me, you can’t budge on that,” Mazzulla said. “And like I said, they’re going to mistakes and that’s OK, but they gotta be mistakes of aggression and mistakes of opportunity, not mistakes of not playing hard.”