It was nice to squeak out a win, but this was another indication of team weaknesses that need to be addressed in the final quarter of the season.
In 2 games since the break, Tatum has 9 turnovers, Brown and Smart 7 apiece. That's how they lost in June. The rest of the team has only 4 turnovers combined in those 2 games (White 2, Brogdon 1, Rob 1). If Smart, Brown, and Tatum aren't better with the ball against the best teams, the Celtics aren't winning this year any more than they did last.
Mazzulla was the right guy to hire to coach this team, but right now some of his tactical decisionmaking is poor and hurts the team. At the end of the day, I don't care whether he calls time outs because the other team is on a run. That doesn't always work. But a benefit of not calling those type of time outs is that there are more time outs to use situationally, and Mazzulla lets key moment after key moment go by without a timeout.
There was a classic example last night. Tatum gets the huge tip in to put the Celtics up 4 with 1 minute left. Grant fouls Harden at the other end, with 46 seconds left, and he hits both to cut the lead to 2. Mazzulla has 2 time outs, and he could call one here to set up the Celtics for the final 46 seconds. If the Celtics go fast they could try to get 2 for 1, for example. But Mazzulla does not call a time out here, and that is OK. If they have a quality possession and score that all but puts the game away, and they don't necessarily need a timeout to be able to do that. But they don't have a quality possession, they have a busted possession that ends with Tatum throwing up a desperation airball with 1 second left on the clock. Mazzulla absolutely needed to call a time out once he saw that the play was going nowhere. But he didn't.
At the end of the play, he challenged the call that Tatum's shot missed the rim, and that burned a time out. He lost the challenge, but that wasn't a bad use of a challenge/time out. It did let him reset the team for the next play, etc. But not calling one earlier was not just a bad decision, it was a type of bad decision that Mazzulla makes repeatedly. All the more so when you consider that ATO plays actually seem to be a Mazzulla strength. Embiid was fouled at the other end and hit his free throws to tie the game with 10 seconds left. With 5 seconds left, Mazzulla calls his final time out and sets up a play that does what it is supposed to do - get Tatum a decent shot he can make. And he does.
Personnel is another issue. Derrick White was the best Celtic on the floor last night. The bench players (and Rob) were generally better than the starters. But White is getting 7th man type minutes. Last night White's strong play allowed the Celtics to come from behind and nearly put the game away, only to have the starters nearly blow the lead they were handed. White checked in with 6:51 left in the third and the Celtics trailing by 11 (67-56) and looking like they weren't going to even make a game of it. By the end of the quarter, they were up 80-78, a 24-11 run to take the lead. White played the first 5:20 of the fourth and the Celtics extended their lead to 97-91. Overall, 41-24 during White's 12 minutes. White did not see the floor again until the final play, as Philly went on a 16-10 run to tie it up against the starters.
White cannot be 7th on the team in minutes while he is playing better than most if not all of the guys ahead of him. Last night, the Celtics offense only had ball movement and assists while White was in (White himself had only 2 assists, but the offense moved the ball with him and didn't without him).