The Boston Celtics dropped their second contest in two games of their 2025 NBA Eastern Conference Semifinals second round series with the New York Knicks to the tune of 91-90. Fueled by another second half collapse after being up by as much as 20 points for the second contest in a row, an allergic reaction to attacking the paint in the second half once again doomed Boston.

There is plenty more to criticize about this game and not too much to praise, but we’ll do our best to glean what we can from a historically bad Celtics performance, given the import of the contest.

Let’s take a look at the pretty, the ugly, and what is still to be determined by Boston in this series.

The Pretty

Bear with us here, this will require a bit of heavy lifting on our part given how things went at TD Garden on Wednesday night. The Celtics were aggressive early, and took advantage of a favorable whistle. A more varied shot diet that saw the team attack the paint and play bully ball paid off, and Boston built a solid, 9-point lead heading into the half.

When the third quarter rolled around, it was almost like a recurring nightmare. The Celtics built their cushion up to 20 points again, only to tighten up and lean into ill-advised jumpers and fadeaways. Oops, this was supposed to be the pretty stuff from Game 2 — we’d say our bad, but we know who to blame.

The Ugly

While we’re on the topic of blame pie, a decent slice is again going to Jayson Tatum, who has evidently lost the ability to remember what was working for him in the first half. Short memories can be important for NBA players, but not this way. Watching Kristaps Porzingis labor to keep up with New York’s backcourt players was also painful to watch; if he’s too ill to play, he should sit.

The head-scratching use of hack-a-Mitchell Robinson (especially late in the fourth quarter) and lack of set plays or even timeouts at critical junctures marked one of the poorer game management examples one can think of from head coach Joe Mazzulla. A general lack of urgency matching the Knicks energy given the stakes also stood out as ugly.

What’s To Be Determined

The Celtics — albeit with a different core in a different contention era — came back from down 0-2 in a series. Will this iteration find a way to do the same? Can the Celtics win 4 out of 5 games, with most of them on the road? What is going on with Porzingis in this series, and can he snap out of it, or swallow his pride and stay on the bench if he isn’t up to the moment healthwise?

Taking a longer view, is a team that has struggled this much against East teams so far in the postseason a serious title contender? If the Celtics don’t make a series of this, just how big will the changes be in the offseason? Is Mazzulla safe? None of what fans of the team want to be thinking about in the second round, but here we are.

This article originally appeared on Celtics Wire: The Pretty, Ugly, and TBD of the Celtics Game 2 loss to the Knicks