Throughout the first 42 minutes of the Celtics' game vs. the Wizards, a solitary thought floated in the ether: Did these guys learn nothing from the New Jersey debacle?

Once again, the C's had given a bad team a reason to believe they could win in their building. Once again, they had come out flat and uninspired. Suddenly, and somewhat predictably, Al Thornton was inhabiting the Washington spirit of Bernard King, circa 1990, and some guy named Andray Blatche was doing a pretty good Elvin Hayes impersonation.

Hard-core hoops enthusiasts know that Blatche, a prep-to-pros product of South Kent School in Connecticut, has been putting up huge numbers since the Wizards cleaned house at the trading deadline.

But when he shoots 10-for-20 and the Celtics' big man trio of Kevin Garnett, Rasheed Wallace and Glen Davis goes 2-for-20, you know you’re having a rough night.

The Celtics turned it on in the final six minutes and escaped with an 86-83 victory Sunday night, but did it mean anything?

“Well, we choked,” Wizards coach Flip Saunders said, and his team surely did fold under the defensive pressure that the Celtics finally began to apply.

But was it a good thing that the C’s finally found a way to pull one out from the jaws of defeat, or is it further evidence that something is amiss when buzz words such as “focus” were being thrown around again?

“I take it as a win,” Celtics coach Doc Rivers said. “We’ll take it. It was good to win a game like this as far as I was concerned. We’ve lost so many of these. It’s nice to every once in a while to play poorly and win. It’s a good win for us.”

Sounds like a good place to start with our three things:

A GOOD, ‘BAD’ WIN

The Celtics were down by 13 points with six minutes left to play and a small, but noticeable, number of fans were already leaving. It would be wonderful if someone said something inspirational that turned the whole thing around, but in truth the Celtics decided collectively to simply dig in defensively.

“We should have been playing with that intensity all game,” Paul Pierce said. “Once our defensive intensity picked up, it changed the whole ballgame.”

Slowly, things began to change as Pierce coolly knocked down a jump shot, and they really changed after Ray Allen got up for a monster slam dunk in transition.

Before the Wizards could score another point, it was down to a three-point game, and then it became grind-it-out basketball, a situation that the Celtics of recent vintage have excelled at. The current crew? Not so much.

“I was happy with the way we dug in there because a lot of these games this year, we let go,” Pierce said. “When we saw we were down 10 with three or four minutes to go, we haven’t been able to pull those games out. Tonight, we saw something that I like to see at this point in the season. We saw the Celtics that I’m used to seeing.”

Pierce especially turned up the pressure on Thornton, a high-scoring yet inconsistent player who was having a monster night but didn’t score in the final 7:50.

“We’ve been there before,” Pierce said. “We’re a veteran squad. We know how to do these things. We know how to win games.”

True, but it certainly doesn’t hurt to actually go out and win games like this every now and again, and as far as the Celtics were concerned, that made this a very ugly but a very satisfying victory.

THE RAY-RAY SHOW IS BACK

The psychoanalyzing of Ray Allen continued after the sharpshooter scored 25 points and made one of his patented game-winners.

Was it the passing of the trade deadline that relaxed him? Was the uncertainty upsetting his legendary routine? Surely, it has to be something, right?

As he has since the deadline, Allen continued to brush off such talk, saying instead that the All-Star break did him some good. For Allen, concession on this point is a non-starter and the same goes for everyone else.

“I didn’t see it,” Rivers said. “I didn’t think it bothered him, honestly. He looked fine to me. Maybe he was pressing, I don’t know. He didn’t let on, let’s put it that way. But he is playing well now. It could have been that, it could be also that it’s the second half of the season and it’s time to get going. He’s a veteran. They tend to pace themselves.”

Or, maybe it was old friend Sam Cassell playing the role of Spike Lee to Allen’s Reggie Miller from his new place on the Wizards bench as an assistant coach. When the Celtics came out of a timeout with 17 seconds and trailing by one, Cassell started in on Allen in his customary nonstop babbling way that only Cassell can babble.

Whatever the reason, since the trading deadline passed, Allen has shot 58 percent from the floor and 44 percent from 3-point range and has averaged 18.7 points in 10 games. Not coincidentally, the Celtics have won seven of those 10 games.

They picked a heck of a time to execute a play that they had just previously “screwed up,” in the words of the coach.

“We were all in the wrong spots and execution was wrong,” Rivers said. “The players came back and they said, ‘Let’s run it again.’ We came back with that. The picks were phenomenal. The action was good because it looked like a pick and roll with Rondo and Paul, but the weakside action was what we were actually looking for.”

Allen was riding his defender Mike Miller like he was going to cut to the basket, and when he felt Miller give too much ground, Allen changed direction and popped out for a wide-open 3-pointer. Ballgame.  

But first, the C's had one more play to mess up.

A FOUL SITUATION

This past weekend, MIT held its annual Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, a gathering of stat geeks so large that it sold out the Boston Convention Center.

During one of the panels, someone asked the crowd if you should intentionally foul with a three-point lead in the final seconds, and almost every hand in the room shot up.

Although it remains a talking point on TV broadcasts, there really is no debate. Of course you should foul.

Under Rivers, the Celtics have long embraced this strategy, so it was somewhat surprising (or maybe not, considering how they had played) that with an 86-83 lead and five seconds on the clock, they allowed Randy Foye to dribble the length of the floor without fouling.

“Yeah, we know that,” Rivers said. “That’s how we played all game. It’s amazing. It was a great time to foul because we were up three. Foye actually took it over halfcourt and then went sideways, which was going to burn even more clock.”

Rivers wanted his team to foul once Foye took it over halfcourt, but instead the C's allowed him to set up Thornton for a decent look at a 3-pointer. 

“I’m a believer in the foul,” Rivers said. “Especially when the other team doesn’t have a timeout.”

So, the Celtics dodged a [Washington] bullet. Maybe their uninspired play finally inspired something greater. Maybe not. The jury is still out on this team, but it felt like progress, even if it took 42 minutes to get started.