Jaylen Brown punishes questionable Warriors strategy in beatdown: 8 takeaways

The Celtics pummeled the Warriors in a Sunday game on ABC that was billed as a rematch between the two finalists in 2022 but ended in a lopsided 140-88 final.

Here are the takeaways as the Celtics won their 11th straight.

1. The Warriors started the game by daring Jaylen Brown to shoot. 

Here’s the first possession of the game, where the Warriors had multiple players available to pick Brown up and simply opted not to bother. 

Here’s Brown’s second 3-point field-goal attempt where Draymond Green doubled a rolling Al Horford rather than stepping out to defend Brown.

Brown responded to the strategy by shooting 6-for-12 in the quarter and scoring 19 points as the Celtics built a 44-22 lead. He finished with a team-high 29 points on 11-for-19 shooting.

Green said the team implemented the game plan 15 minutes before leaving the locker room. According to Steve Kerr, the strategy was to allow Green to help in the paint and limit “easy stuff.” 

A fairly easy counterpoint would be to note that Green helping in the paint didn’t limit “easy stuff” — it simply decided which easy stuff the Warriors were going to allow. The Celtics were allowed to play their preferred brand of basketball, except instead of collapsing the defense into the paint and kicking out to shooters, the Warriors pre-collapsed their defense so that the ball wouldn’t need to move around the key. Maybe the Warriors hoped that Brown would miss and grow frustrated. Maybe they hoped that taking away the rhythm of the Celtics’ pass-pass-shoot offense would make them miss. 

“I was actually all for it,” Green said. “Like, let’s try it and see if it works. It don’t go well, oh well. If it does, we found something. All right, it ain’t work. So we move on.”

Daring the Celtics to make 3-pointers at this point in the season is … quite the decision.

“We were really grateful for that,” Mazzulla said. “As we talked about, teams are going to guard us in different ways, and we just have to stay open-minded to what gives us the best chance to win. There’s a game plan, but then when the game starts, the game will tell us what we need to do.”

“First time it’s ever happened to me,” Brown said. “Honestly I was a bit surprised. Took a little bit of adjusting. … I don’t take a lot of 3s for the most part throughout the season because we got enough of that. I get to the paint and I usually open it up for everyone else. But if you want to dare me to shoot, we can do that, too. I thought it was a little disrespectful. But we took advantage of it and we hit them back.”

2. For the sake of fairness and consistency: The Warriors were playing their third game in four nights, and their seventh game in 11 nights in the final game of a road trip. They probably weren’t beating the Celtics on Sunday no matter how much rest they had — and they certainly weren’t beating the Celtics by surrendering wide open 3s to Brown — but if you believe the Celtics deserve something of a pass for their embarrassing Bucks loss earlier this year (and we do), the Warriors deserve some modicum of the same grace here. 

3. After finishing off an impressive spinning layup against the Mavericks on Friday, Brown spun mid-air and fired a pass out to Jayson Tatum in the third quarter for an open 3-pointer.

4. The Celtics shot 25-for-49 from behind the arc (51%), and it was striking how easy a number of their triples were. Setting aside Brown’s attempts, Jrue Holiday buried a 3-pointer off one pass and one screen in the first quarter. Derrick White did the same less than a minute later. The Warriors failed to pick up Sam Hauser in transition twice. They lost Jayson Tatum once for an open triple, which allowed him to zero in for two more 3-pointers before the end of the quarter.

Chalk it up to exhaustion or lack of focus, but the Warriors’ defense got badly picked apart.

“JB and JT are special and they can easily take crazy shots and nobody would even look twice,” White said. “But they’re doing a great job of just reading the game and trying to get a good look each and every time. I think we’re just doing that each time down the court with more consistency than probably in the past. It starts with them at the top and everybody’s just playing really well.”

5. On his 26th birthday, Tatum scored 27 points on 9-for-13 shooting. He hit 4-for-5 from three and dished out five assists. 

6. The Celtics went into halftime with a lead that looked insurmountable (we haven’t done the research, but we can’t imagine many teams have come back from an 82-38 deficit), and they proceeded to win the first few minutes of the third quarter 17-10 before both coaches pulled their regular rotation players. 

“That’s really important — to be in situations where you can have a chance to have a let down, and you win by seven,” Mazzulla said. “That’s why they stayed out there, and that’s why we practice that. It was very important that we won that first segment of the third quarter.”

Payton Pritchard, who tallied 19 points, six rebounds, and six assists and played in both the rotation and the bench unit, had high praise for the Celtics’ approach. 

“I would say probably one of the best we’ve played all year,” he said. “Defensively we were physical. Offensively we got to our spots, made our shots, but on the defensive end, we were communicating, really physical with them, and played well.”

7. White was the only player who admitted that Sunday’s game meant a little bit more to the Celtics due to the events of 2022.

“It’s like a bigger game than just one game just because we played them in the Finals, but at the end of the day, it’s just one game and it’s nice to get a win, especially against a team that’s playing really well right now,” he said. “And we knew it was going to be a good challenge, so it’s definitely good to get a win against a team that’s playing well.”

Despite Brown’s perceived disrespect, he expressed admiration for the Warriors’ organization. 

“The Golden State Warriors have been the best team in basketball over the last 10-plus years, so nothing but respect on our behalf,” Brown said. ”And I think that’s exactly how you show it, is you come out and play hard and compete. …

“We handle business and take care of it but we don’t do it arrogantly. We do it with humility. And it’s a lot of respect for the Golden State Warriors but we feel like it’s our time now.”

8. After beating a hot Mavericks team and a Warriors team that won 11 out of 13 games prior to Sunday’s debacle, the Celtics face their third tough test in a row on Tuesday when they travel to Cleveland. The Cavaliers have cooled off since the 18-2 stretch that rocketed them to the No. 2 seed in the Eastern Conference (3-4 in their last seven games), but they have the league’s sixth-best point differential, per Cleaning the Glass, on the strength of the NBA’s third-best defense. 

“There’s no real bottling up [momentum],” White said. “Each game’s different and Cleveland’s been a good team, especially playing at home. So we understand what the challenge is going to be and we’ve got to be ready to go.”

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