The Celtics turned a 22-point lead into a 121-113 loss to the Pistons in Detroit on Tuesday afternoon, a season-opening collapse that cut through Paul George’s Boston debut and left Jayson Tatum and the rest of the reshaped roster answering for a second-half breakdown.
George gave Boston a strong early lift, but the game changed once Detroit found its defense and the Celtics lost their grip on the paint. The Pistons ripped off a 23-0 run behind Duncan Robinson and Javonte Green, turned stops into transition points and 3-pointers, and then kept coming until the Celtics were outscored after leading 99-89 with 8:19 left in the third quarter.
That shift mattered because Boston entered the night trying to make Tatum the clear focal point after moving away from a Tatum-Brown iso-heavy approach in late-game possessions, and Brown was out. Instead, Tatum went 6 for 23 and 0 for 7 from 3-point range, missed all nine of his attempts outside 17 feet and made only 2 of 7 shots at the rim. He said the shot felt good but it was not one of his best nights, then added that he has to play better and can learn from the missed chances at the basket.
The interior problems were even harder to ignore. Mitchell Robinson and Neemias Queta combined for just 7 points and 7 rebounds in 40 minutes, and Robinson’s Boston debut was interrupted when Jalen Duren kicked him in the left ankle in the first quarter. Robinson said he got his ass kicked on the glass, and later admitted he could not have a start like that, saying he needed to compete better and was slow on too many plays.
George was also dragged into the collapse after re-entering following his third-quarter heater. He scored well enough to justify the early optimism, but he missed 5 of 7 shots in the final period as Boston’s offense stalled and the Pistons kept pressuring the rim. The result was a game that exposed the same problem from both ends: the Celtics could not keep control once the pace changed, and they had little interior presence when Detroit started pushing them around and outhustling them.
That is the early warning for Boston. A team built to be more versatile cannot lean on perimeter shot-making alone when the game tightens, and Tuesday showed how quickly a lead can vanish when the Celtics lose the glass, the rim and the final stretch at once. The next test is whether they can recover that interior edge before the holes in this new version of the team become the story of Opening Night.
