The plain truth is that there's absolutely no difference whatsoever between performance in the season's first 20 days and any other 20-day span throughout the year. It's all a matter of perception.
In the first five games of the season, the young and inexperienced rotation - Sandro Mamukelashvili is the oldest at 26 with the most years played [4] - looked to already be an insolvable quandary. It was 16th in net rating, 21st in points scored, and as resistant as rotten fruit on the glass (25th in rebounding percentage). The lot of them looked lost, small, and, ineffectual. Only Jamison Battle had a positive plus/minus in their losses, and he played limited minutes in just two games.
The Celtics have a brutally difficult start to the season, especially for a team with so much change, and they were in real danger of digging themselves a nasty hole after they lost a winnable game against the 76ers in the opener. Losing to the Knicks and Pistons weren't problematic results in a vacuum, but with two three-games-in-four-nights stretches and contests against championship contenders on the horizon, the Celtics had a chance to go winless or 1-6 in their first seven games.
