"We Just Came Up F***ing Short!": Celtics Suffer Historically Bad Shooting Night

How much lower can things go for the Boston Celtics this season? Wednesday night they suffered through an historically bad shooting night, going a shocking 4-for-42 on threes, in losing 91-82 to the Los Angeles Clippers. That's 9.5% from behind the arc.

It's only the 2nd time in NBA history that a team has put up 40+ threes and shot less than 10%. Last season's Houston Rockets are the only others to manage the same feat—but that team was in a full-on tank job. 

Jaylen Brown led the brick brigade going 1-for-13 from behind the arc in the game. But that wasn't his only stupefying stat... Brown's 36 shot attempts without a single assist is a feat that hadn't been done in the NBA in 23 years. It's true that he shoud have had a number of assists—if his teammates weren't bricking wide-open threes at the same pace as Brown. 

And the numbers keep getting uglier: In the last 8 years, out of 482 games in which a team shot at least 35 catch-and-shoot 3s, this performance was 482nd. Dead last. 

One final @ESPNStatsInfo stat: Boston went 4-for-39 on catch-and-shoot 3s in this game. Since Second Spectrum began tracking games in 2013-14, there have been 482 games – including this one – where a team shot at least 35 C&S 3s. Boston's shooting tonight ranked 482nd among them.

— Tim Bontemps (@TimBontemps) December 30, 2021

The 4th quarter saw the C's go 1-for-18 from downtown, to cement their 4th loss in 5 games, this one their second straight to a severely shorthanded team.  

But hey, you can look on the bright side: the Celts took 20 more shots than the Clippers, and generated a TON of wide-open looks. That's usually a good thing for an NBA team. It's preferable, however, that some of them actually go down. 

But the last word simply has to go to Celtics' forward Grant Williams, in the understatement of the year: "I think shooting is something we have to be better at, I guess."

Photo Credit: Winslow Townson-USA TODAY Sports