Simons epitomized the reality in front of Boston for that Nets loss, and was not being offered as an excuse for how the Celtics played.

The Boston Celtics lost an ugly 113-105 NBA Cup home game on Friday to a Brooklyn Nets team that entered the contest with a 2-12 record.

The Nets come into this game following a 129-105 win at the Washington Wizards on Sunday in which Brooklyn was able to use spurts in the second and fourth quarters to put away Washington long before the final buzzer sounded.

Brooklyn Nets face a severe injury crisis with multiple key players sidelined, impacting their rotation and depth as they grapple with a 2-12 record. Meanwhile, the Boston Celtics, despite Jayson Tatum's absence due to Achilles surgery,

The Brooklyn Nets pulled off a shocking 113-105 road victory against the Boston Celtics on Friday, days after they fell to that same team in their own building.

The Celtics responded with an 18-3 run, led by Jaylen Brown, to put the game away. Not only did the defeat drop the Nets to 2-12 on the season, it also dropped them to 0-7 in Brooklyn, matching the longest home losing streak in franchise history, previously set in the 2009-10 season.

Payton Pritchard scored a season-high 28 points on Sunday to help the Celtics hold onto a win over the Clippers.

Naulls was, with Bill Russell, K.C. Jones, Sam Jones, and Tom Sanders, part of the first all-Black lineup in the history of North American pro sports in 1964, and a key part of three of Boston's titles in their golden age of dominance in the mid-1960s. He averaged 10.3 points and 4.6 rebounds per game with the Celtics -- rest in peace.