Every morning, we compile the links of the day and dump them here… highlighting the big story line. Because there’s nothing quite as satisfying as a good morning dump.

“Everybody’s been patting them on the back for the last week,” Stevens told reporters in Cleveland. “That’s what happens sometimes. We have to get back to being a good team.”

After building a 26-point lead against the Golden State Warriors in the first half of Sunday’s game, the Celtics were outscored 176-101 over the 69-minute span that followed. That included the Warriors rallying for a 106-101 win on Sunday and the Cavaliers building a 44-point lead (100-56) with 10 minutes to play Tuesday.

Offered the opportunity to dip into the coaches’ cliche handbook and suggest that Boston needed to simply move past Tuesday’s disaster, particularly with the second night of a back-to-back looming when the Utah Jazz visit TD Garden on Wednesday, Stevens refused.

“It’s important for it to hurt; it better hurt,” Stevens said. “We’ll find out a lot more about ourselves in 24 hours.”

ESPN Boston: Stevens on loss: It better hurt

“I told them it wasn’t good enough,” Stevens said. “And it’s not OK to walk out of here thinking that that’s the best team and you have nights like this. We played individual basketball on both ends of the floor the whole night. And individual basketball against these guys doesn’t work because their individuals are the best in the game. So you better figure it out that we’ve gotta play collectively on both ends.

“The way we played is not right. It’s not acceptable. If we play the right way, does that mean we’re going to have a chance to win? Maybe a chance. Maybe a chance. But you play the right way anyway because it’s the right thing to do, and we didn’t.”

MassLive: Stevens rips team after blowout loss

Boom.

Oh… you know what time it is…

Time for me to bust out my favorite (but NSFW for language) movie clip for situations like this.

Ladies and Gentlemen… I give you… Winston Wolfe:

Now I’m sure Brad Stevens is exaggerating a bit here for effect. But he’s not too far off. I think a lot of these guys needed a little dose of reality.

It’s not that they haven’t been playing well. They have. They’ve been good enough to take advantage of favorable situations. But let’s look at this run they’ve been on:

They beat Phoenix in an Isaiah Thomas revenge game against a team that had just been gutted by trades

They beat the Knicks.  They are the Knicks.

They beat Charlotte in a tough, hard-fought game. Charlotte had the same record as Boston after the game.

They held a 26 point lead on Golden State, a team wrapping up an Eastern trip and who came out pretty soft and missing a lot of jumpers. Also, moral victories aside, they ended up losing this game.

The Celtics, even after all their trades, are still about as good as we thought they’d be when the season started… which is good enough to beat the really bad teams and, when the good teams decide they want to take a night off, give them a good run and steal a couple of those.

But when a good team decides it wants to work the heavy bag a little bit and get a good sweat going, it goes a little something like this…

So much like the career jobber Barry Horowitz at the top of the post (sorry if you don’t get the wrestling reference) this team is likable, kinda fun to watch sometimes, good for the occasional win against a worse nobody, but we all know that gif ended with Lex Luger putting him in the rack in no time.

That’s ok, though. It’s not shocking that the Celtics, and the rest of us, got a little caught up after a 7-4 February and the blazing hot start by Isaiah Thomas. They’ve been fun, they’ve given the season a little life, and thanks to the wildly crappy Eastern Conference, they’ve managed to get us thinking about the playoffs.

The Celtics have a tough back-to-back tonight. Coming home from a road game against a Jazz team that’s won 3 straight games and 7 of their last 10 is not going to be easy.

Last night was a big-time dose of reality for the Celtics. We’ll see if that medicine heals their heads at all.

Related links:  CSNNE: Stevens on loss: It better hurt

Page 2: Isaiah hears what you say about him carrying the ball. Isaiah don’t care

“Every time I play Golden State, even when they had [coach] Mark Jackson last year, every time I had the ball, they’re yelling, ‘He’s carrying the ball! He’s carrying the ball!’ ” Thomas said. “That’s probably the one team I hear it from.

“Some [other] coaches do it, but that team does it consistently. I don’t know if they do it to everybody, every point guard, but since I’ve been in the league they’ve been on the refs about me doing it.”

Thomas made it clear that until a referee decides his moves are illegal, he is not overly concerned about what opposing coaches think.

“If they’re not going to call it, I must not be doing something wrong,” he said.

Globe: Thomas not concerned by “carrying” charges

Does Thomas carry?

Yes.

Does EVERYONE in the NBA carry nowadays?

Yes.

That’s today’s NBA. We can either accept it and move on, or bitch and moan like we’re 65 years old pining for the good ol’ days. You can even watch how Bob Cousy dribbled the ball and noticed that his hand never really went to the side of the ball. Compare it to Chris Paul (NSFW lyrics in background music) and you can easily see where guys are allowed to hesitate, or as Steve Kerr accused Thomas of doing, discontinue his dribble only to resume it.

That’s how it is. Everyone does it. So until the NBA changes the rule, people can STFU about it.

And Finally…

Otto Porter… with the greatest defensive lapse ever…

https://platform.vine.co/static/scripts/embed.js

The rest of the links:

Herald: Perkins, LeBron, together again | Cavaliers lay it big on Celtics  |  CSNNE: LeBron highly motivated vs. C’s  |  ESPN Boston: The Cleveland show  |  WEEI: 5 things we learned as LeBron, Cavs blow out Celtics  |  MassLive: Perkins shares recruiting text from LeBron