CHICAGO — The good news for the Celtics is they won’t have to meet the Bulls in the playoffs.

Or any of these other lottery-bound clubs that seem to give Boston so much trouble on too many occasions, though Kyrie Irving said he doesn’t believe anyone can take his team when it gets to best-of-seven time.

Despite a head-shaking loss to the lowly Chicago Bulls on Saturday following a toe-to-toe loss to Milwaukee two nights earlier, the Celtics' Kyrie Irving says he's not worried long term: "I still don't see anybody beating us in seven games." Associated Press/ Aaron Gash

Saturday evening, the Celtics dropped a 126-116 decision to a team that began the night 22 games behind them in the Eastern Conference standings. Of the four teams with the worst records in the NBA, the Celtics have now lost to three (Phoenix and New York are the others, and they still have one chance left with Cleveland).

This wasn’t exactly the same Chicago outfit Boston busted by 56 points at home on Dec. 8, but there is no logical reason for what took place in this one.

Irving, though, was showing a bold face in the quiet visitors’ dressing room.

Asked where this one ranks with the season’s worst losses, he said, “It’s behind me.”

Already?

“Yeah, it’s the NBA,” Irving said. “Trying to get to the playoffs, so that’s where the fun begins.”

And he’s not concerned that the struggles could last into those playoffs.

“Nah, we’ll be fine.”

Why?

“Because I’m here,” Irving said.

While Zach LaVine (42 points) and Lauri Markkanen (35) each went for career highs, Irving played the entire third quarter and the first 3:18 of the fourth. He took a 2:11 break, then went the rest of the way, finishing with 37 points in his second straight 41-minute outing.

The Celtics went from 25 down to within eight on an Irving 3-pointer with 10:24 left, but Markkanen hit a 3 and drove for a three-point play to cool the comeback.

Brad Stevens said before tipoff that “each game’s its own entity. You’ve got to play well to have a chance to win.”

And play hard, too.

But there was an effort gap in this game that’s hard to explain – though it was glaring on the stat sheet as the Bulls had a 17-3 edge in first-half fast-break points.

One would have expected it to be the other way around, for while the Celtics took a leisurely bus ride down from Milwaukee on Thursday night, the Bulls were in Orlando, where they had to go down to the wire Friday to win for just the 15th time this season.

The most taxing part of Friday for the Celtics was the long bus ride to and from practice.

But they were outrebounded by the Bulls 49-32 and gave up 17 second-chance points while scoring just five themselves. The 50-50 balls weren’t really 50-50 propositions with the way Chicago was playing – and the way Boston wasn’t. The problem was that the Celtics offense was coming so easily early on that they let up just enough on the other end of the floor to let the Bulls stay in a game in which they shouldn’t have belonged.

And then the Bulls took it over.

“We got outplayed in every which way,” said Stevens. “There’s no two ways around it. Credit them. Obviously, once they got rolling there was no stopping them. We always say if you let a team get comfortable, then they make the tough ones. And we let them get awfully comfortable. I thought our transition defense in the first half was really bad. And then I thought that, obviously, the start of the second we didn’t give ourselves much of a chance.

“At the end of the day, and I’ve said this before, I’m disappointed in myself, and I’ve got to do a lot better.”

When it was noted that he’s said that a few times this season, Stevens said, “It hasn’t gotten much better, has it? I’ve got to do better.”

So do the Celtics. And while it seems that player-for-player they should have more than enough to avoid potholes like this, the disappearance of a concerted effort two nights after going toe-to-toe with conference leader Milwaukee has to be both frustrating and confounding.

“That’s a choice that we all have to make,” said Irving. “As a team, as a collective, I know we all have winning at the forefront of our mind – at least I hope so. And you just go about it every single day, the way you prepare and go out into the game and the lineups that we have and what we’re doing, you’ve just got to be able to adapt. And in this league, the teams that adapt the quickest or they adapt at the right time are successful in the playoffs.

“So we’re still waiting for that thing to click. We’ve gone on eight-games, six-games, four-games winning streaks, and then we’ll hit a lull of three games and then we’re back answering questions like this.

“So it is what it is. I don’t get frustrated about this stuff anymore. It’s just part of the regular season. In the playoffs, when we can plan for a team, prepare for a team, I still don’t see anybody beating us in seven games.”

With 22 games left, the Celtics sit in fifth place in the East, a game away from home-court advantage in the first round of the playoffs. If things stay the same, Irving and his mates will have to fulfill his belief the hard way.

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