Malcolm Brogdon leads dominant bench: 8 takeaways as Celtics take down Bulls
Boston's bench unit noticeably outplayed Chicago's in the 123-119 win.
The Celtics battled the Bulls but held them off down the stretch, claiming a 123-119 victory to improve to 5-3.
Here’s what happened.
1. The Celtics’ bench unit was dominant. Sam Hauser, Luke Kornet, and Grant Williams were plus-19, 17, and 15 respectively, and their impact felt at least that significant particularly as the Celtics built a second-half lead. When they left the game in the fourth quarter after propelling the Celtics’ lead as high as 14 with seven minutes remaining, the first unit quickly gave the lead back.
“Number one, it’s fun,” Al Horford said when asked about watching the second unit. “Number two, it’s like, ‘Man, we’ve got to try to play like that more often than not. That looks better.’ It’s cool to see the second unit do that, and for us, yeah, we have to play that way. Play like that more.”
But Malcolm Brogdon was the spark for the second unit’s engine. Brogdon finished with 25 points on 9-for-10 shooting, and his only miss probably would have been a made layup if Javonte Green hadn’t slapped the ball away. Brogdon attacked the rim relentlessly and scored over and over, and — in a nice summation of his elite performance, he shot a lower percentage from the free-throw line (77.8 percent, 7-for-9 from the floor) than he did from the floor.
“He’s always in the paint, it feels like,” Derrick White said. “So when you’re able to do that it puts the defense in a lot of problems. He does a great job of running that second unit and they were huge for us tonight.”
2. Tatum is part of the second-unit lineup as well, rounding out a group that has size (Kornet), versatility (Williams and Brogdon), and shooting (Hauser).
“I know I gave Sam a lot of s—- in the beginning of the season about being the best shooter,” Tatum said. “But the thing that I liked about – I gave him his credit in the locker room; obviously he hit some shots, we know Sam can really shoot. But the best play, I think, Sam made was he came off a DHO in the first half and I think they blitzed him, and he backed out and threw it over the top of Luke, and Luke got fouled. I told him, I said, ‘Now you’re playing basketball.’
“Sam, I don’t know if he would’ve did that last season. I think it just shows how hard he’s worked this offseason to earn that opportunity and make the most out of it. And Luke is the ultimate team player, do the right thing, rim protection, lob threat. Malcolm being aggressive, and Grant. So we just played with a lot of pace on both ends of the floor and we were just clicking at the right time.”
3. Tatum scored 36 points on 23 shots … but he was 8-for-23 from the field and 3-for-10 from 3-point range. The big difference? He went 17-for-20 from the free-throw line, which was a career-high.
“The older I get, I think, the more my body develops, the more I’m able to take contact,” Tatum said. “And also just reading when we’re in the bonus, time and situation in the game, I think I’ve gotten a lot better at that over the years.”
As Tatum stepped to the free-throw line in the fourth quarter, the TD Garden crowd serenaded him with chants of “M-V-P.” It wasn’t the first time (and won’t be the last), but if Tatum keeps going to the line at the rate, he has a real shot. He won’t shoot 20 free throws every game, but he’s up to 8.6 per game which would be a career-high by a significant margin, and his defense through eight games has been excellent.
“Every season I’m just trying to get better in every aspect,” Tatum said. “Just trying to be better than I was last season and impact the game all over, offensively and on the defensive end. I think that’s contagious throughout the whole team.”
4. Kornet has impressed his teammates enormously through eight games.
“Luke works as hard as I’ve seen any guy work,” Horford said. “He’s literally always the first one in the gym, and usually the last guy out. The way that the game is being played, he’s adjusted, he’s found a way to make an impact.”
Kornet blocked a pair of shots, both because he stayed down and engaged in the play. Those blocks felt somewhat ironic, given that one of the major talking points around Kornet this season is that he keeps jumping very early in front of shooters to distract them when he can’t close out to the 3-point line.
5. Jaylen Brown has a lot of poster dunks on his resume, and Friday’s one-hand 808 drop against Nikola Vucevic probably doesn’t crack the top five.
Still, it was a good one, and well worth watching if you missed it.
6. Al Horford doesn’t visibly talk a lot of trash, but when he does, it’s always a little funny.
On Friday, after DeMar DeRozan complained that he didn’t get a foul call, Horford played a pretend violin for him, which — frankly — is elite trash talk.
7. DeRozan frustrated the Celtics — a monstrous 46-point performance that included 22 trips to the free-throw line and 13-for-23 shooting (with zero 3-pointers, which is the DeRozan special). The Celtics have often struggled to contain him in the past, and Friday was no exception.
“He’s a great player,” Joe Mazzulla said. “He does a great job of drawing contact. I thought we did the best job we could at showing our hands and making it tough on him. But he really gets the ball to the spots that he wants to. You’re going to have to really contest them and you’re going to have to live with those if you’re winning because you don’t want to give up 3s to great shooters and we only helped a couple times and gave those up. You just have to feel how the game goes depending on how you guard him.
“He’s a great player, he created a lot of contact and keeps pressure on you and your defensive identity.”
8. Before the game, ESPN analyst Jalen Rose made waves when he suggested the Celtics should have made the name of the woman involved in Ime Udoka’s situation public.
“We know his name,” Rose said. “Maybe I’m missing something as it relates to the law, but why don’t we know her name? It’s not like she’s a minor. I think we should know her name publicly as well.”
At halftime, however, Rose apologized for his comments in a standalone segment after a commercial break. Rose said it was made clear to him that the woman involved was a subordinate to Udoka.
“I now understand fully why her name should not be released to the public,” Rose said.
The Celtics face the Knicks at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday.
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