Doc: Despite win, C's 'not playing great'

The Celtics blew an 11-point fourth-quarter lead to a Washington team playing without its two best players and committed 19 turnovers in the process. Still, the Celtics, thanks to late heroics from Brandon Bass and energy from Chris Wilcox and Kevin Garnett, were able to eke out a 100-94 win in overtime Wednesday night at TD Garden.

Celtics coach Doc Rivers is searching for positives as his 2-2 team struggles to find an identity and rhythm.

“Well, we won the game," Rivers said. "And right now that’s the type of team we are. We’re not playing great. It’s good to win a game like that. We’ve won two like that. You knew coming into this night, no matter who you’re playing, when you’re play a team back-to-back games, you give them three days, you knew it’d be a tough game. But we made it so much harder. I thought we played for the first five minutes great, and then we went back to old habits. I thought our energy was terrible."

Rivers pointed to the efforts of Chris Wilcox as a reason for the Celtics pulling things together in the third quarter.

"I thought Chris Wilcox saved the game for us, singlehandedly, with his effort," Rivers said of Wilcox, who played just four minutes in the game but scored six points, grabbed two rebounds while getting to the free throw line three times. "And I thought it was obvious. He didn’t do anything but played hard and played with great effort. And I thought that that leadership led everybody else into doing. Kevin (Garnett), always, I always exclude him because he always plays the right way. But we’ve got to get more guys that play harder, better. I don’t care about ‘well,’ you know, I don’t care if we play ‘well’ or not, because that’s just human. If you can make shots or not, it happens. But we just have to play with a better focus and we’ve got to run our schemes better.”

For more, visit the Celtics team page at weei.com/celtics [1] and the Green Street [2] blog.