5 rational thoughts about a complicated Celtics loss to the Lakers

Last night’s game, and the aftermath to it on social media, was a wild whirlwind, made worse by the uncertainty over Marcus Smart’s calf injury (which turned out to be less bad than it looked). Let’s try and see through some of that in the clearer light of the morning (OK, early afternoon, whatever):

1. The Cs did play up to the challenge, all things considered.

Lost in the shuffle of it being a loss to the Lakers, a loss on national network TV, the Kemba Walker struggles (we’ll get to those) and everything else was how well-matched the teams were. Neither team was ever far behind the other. The number of points where they were near-identical is kinda wild:

They took and made almost the same…