Celtics' Rout of Warriors Marked By Sense Of Togetherness They'll Need To Avoid Playoff Disappointment

Boston displayed chemistry we haven't seen in a long time, but is it here to stay?

OAKLAND, Calif. -- When talking about his team's inconsistent, disappointing season before Tuesday night's game against the Warriors, Celtics coach Brad Stevens continually brought up one missing factor: togetherness.

It doesn't take a body language expert or world-class rhetorical analysis to figure out that something hasn't worked with the Celtics this season, particularly in a stretch after the All-Star break in which they had lost five of six games. Some of it inevitably has fallen on the shoulders of Kyrie Irving, who has reportedly been disengaged from the team for over a month amid free-agency speculation, and recently Celtics guard Jaylen Brown even called the team dynamic "toxic."

Stevens broke it down bluntly before the game -- the Celtics had been playing as individuals instead of as a unit.

"You are going to have fun in this business if you play well, you feel like you've done your job well, if you've left it all out there together and you feel like you are doing it with a group that is playing as a group -- that's how it works," Stevens said. " ... We haven't played well together for a lot of the year, and that hasn't been something that our guys have run away from."

So it was surprising -- shocking even -- that just an hour later, the Celtics were whipping the ball around the perimeter, communicating on defense and dishing out a season-high 38 assists en route to a 128-95 walloping of the defending champs -- the team's worst home loss in the storied Steve Kerr era.

This was the same team that had lost five of six? This was the same group that Stevens had condemned before the game for not playing together? If you parachuted into Oracle Arena at pretty much any point on Tuesday night, you would have thought the Celtics were a 70-win team and the favorite to be the Eastern Conference representative in the NBA Finals.

Instead, for the past week, journalists and fans alike have written them off due to seemingly unfixable issues.

For just a second, you might have thought that the Warriors and Celtics had switched uniforms. Gone was the trademark ball movement and jaw-dropping skill that has made the Warriors the paragon of basketball for the past several years. Instead their night was marked by horrific defensive lapses, isolation offense and general discontent. It led to a smattering of boos from the Oracle crowd, including a way-too-audible "Play defense for God's sakes!" heckle from one fan who had seen enough.