Doc Rivers had a bad feeling at halftime. His team was ahead by just two points on the lowly Pistons and he felt like it should have been more like a dozen. He didn’t like the way the offense was playing. He wasn’t real sold on the defense, either. Rivers turned to his coaches and said, “Now we’re going to have to earn this.”

Sure enough, playing without Kevin Garnett who missed his first game of the season with a strained hip flexor, the Celtics couldn’t get stops when they needed them and they couldn’t run a functioning offense when they started falling behind. They were outscored 25-16 in the fourth en route to a discouraging 98-88 loss.

“We made some bonehead plays,” Rivers said. “We leave Ben Gordon to trap. We rotate to Ben Wallace out to the 3-point line. We give up an offensive rebound on a free throw. Those three possessions to me changed the game. It went from a two-point game to an eight-point game, and to me, give a team that’s struggling for wins life, they’ll beat you. That’s what happened.”

In any NBA season there will be nights like this. Nights when Ray Allen doesn’t make a shot until the final minute. Nights when Paul Pierce scores just two points in the first three quarters. Nights when a player like Ben Gordon gets hot in the fourth quarter. 

The Celtics have had their share of nights like this already this season and unfortunately they’ve had too many of them at home. The schedule-makers gifted them 19 home games in their first 28 – more than any other team in the league -- and they responded with an 11-8 record.

That mediocre home mark has set them back. The 76ers, for example, had the benefit of playing 18 of their first 30 at home and they won 13 of those games, which helps explain their division-leading 20-10 record.

“We’ve been very disappointing at home, which is very surprising,” Pierce said. “I really don’t understand the reason for our inconsistent play. But maybe sometimes the team needs a little road trip to get it together, maybe it’s the trip that we need.”

The Celtics play the Bulls on Thursday and the Pistons again on Sunday with Dallas and Oklahoma City looming next week. They don’t return home for two weeks with the All-Star break and a game in Cleveland in between. That’s just a precursor to a nine-games in two-weeks slog slated for mid-March.

If we’ve learned anything about this team through the first 28 games, it’s that we don’t know enough. They lost three straight to open the season and then won four in a row before a five-game losing streak. They won nine of 10 to right the ship and then dropped three of the last four. The Celtics don’t have the look of a contender, but they don’t look like pushovers either. Somewhere in between is their true level and they’re going to have to find themselves away from the Garden.

“I want to play better, clearly,” Rivers said. “We’re going through a lot of stuff with all the injuries and so are the other teams. I just think it’s going to be this type of year. I keep saying it. Every time it looks like we’re about to take off and play well, we do this. I’m hoping at some point this year we’ll take off, but we haven’t done that.” 

Right at the top of the list is figuring out who they are as a team, and once again that leads to the inevitable question of whether they are able to follow Rajon Rondo’s lead and ultimately, where Rondo can take them.

Rondo scored a career-high 35 points and made 15-of-27 shots. He scored in transition, he scored on the block and he scored from the perimeter. He also set Chris Wilcox up for a 17-point night with most of those points coming in transition.

“I love playing with Chris,” Rondo said. “He’s probably one of the fastest bigs in the league. I tell him to get out there and run with me and he does a great job every night. We’re starting to get easy baskets in transition and that’s what we need offensively.”

Rondo didn’t force his own action, but as the same time, he wasn’t able to get Pierce or Allen involved. It also must be said that the two veterans didn’t do much to help their own cause, especially in transition.

“Offensively, I didn’t like the way we played the whole night, really,” Rivers said. “There wasn’t a lot of movement. I like Rondo being aggressive, but on the other hand we didn’t get a lot of ball movement.”

It’s a fine line that Rondo has to walk with this team. He took more than his share of the blame for their disastrous performance in Toronto after he played a passive floor game and there was the uncomfortable feeling that he tried to do too much against the Pistons, even thought he was undeniably brilliant at times.

“I want Rondo to stay aggressive,” Rivers said. “We want him to stay aggressive, all right? That’s really important for us. The way to really do that is off stops. The first half that’s how we did it and the second half we were not getting stops and that affected how effective he was.” 

Now the road beckons and things are about to get tougher.

“So far we’ve proven we can beat anybody and lose to anybody,” Rivers said. “That’s the maddening part. What we haven’t proven is that we can be a consistent basketball team. That’s what we have to go get to.”