Jayson Tatum, Celtics blow out scuffling Warriors to open road trip: 9 takeaways
Tatum and Jaylen Brown went to work in the paint on Monday night.
Jayson Tatum and the Celtics got back on track Monday, opening their road trip with a massive 125-85 win over the short-handed Warriors.
Here are the takeaways.
The Celtics reminded us why it’s too early to panic.
That’s the Celtics team you might remember from early in the season.
The Warriors, to be clear, were in no condition to contend against a Celtics team that needed an angry blowout win after an embarrassing finish against the Hawks on Saturday. Four rotation players, including Draymond Green, were out injured. Steph Curry led the way with 18 points and Moses Moody scored 13, but nobody else scored in double figures. The Warriors shot 14-for-53 from 3-point range, which is the kind of shooting line we’ve seen a little too often over the Celtics’ last 15 games.
But a hallmark of the Celtics early in the season was how they took care of business against mediocre opponents, and this iteration of the Warriors — with all due respect to Steph Curry, one of the greatest players of all time — is undeniably mediocre.
The Celtics, meanwhile, were excellent. Jayson Tatum scored a game-high 22 points, and everyone spread the offense around generously. The threes fell at a high clip (20-for-48, 41.7 percent), the ball moved and nobody reached 30 minutes played. Kristaps Porzingis and Al Horford played 22 and 20 minutes respectively as the reserves took the wheel for most of the fourth quarter and steered the team to a bigger win.
In two of their last three games, the Celtics shot better than 40 percent from three. Both of those games were comfortable wins, one each against the Magic and Warriors.
You can analyze the Celtics until you are blue in the face, and a few things will stand out — the defensive attention to detail isn’t always present this season, and the offense doesn’t always hum to its highest potential. When they are struggling, you see fewer plays like this.
But the Celtics’ game plan is, at times, devastatingly simple: Employ a bunch of really good 3-pointers who can also defend, and run an offense that generates good looks for those 3-point shooters. When the good looks don’t fall, the Celtics are still good enough to be a roughly .500 team, but to be a championship caliber team, they need to make shots.
The cold stretch the Celtics just hit tripped them up, and it showed how they might end up struggling if they hit another cold stretch in the playoffs. But if they make shots, they remain a genuine contender to repeat even as the Cavaliers and Thunder bash opponents in the regular season.
“It hasn’t been as easy as we would have liked, and I think that’s good for us,” Jaylen Brown said. “It’s not supposed to be, and it just shows you how hard it is to win. Night to night, you can’t take winning for granted. You can’t skip steps or details. Us losing is a good reminder of that.
“This is what it takes each and every night to be that. So we’ve got to get that back and build on it.”
Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown scored a lot in the paint.
Tatum and Brown combined to score 12 shots in the paint against a Warriors team with few viable defense options for either of them. Bigs can’t stay in front. Guards aren’t strong enough to keep them out. Andrew Wiggins really isn’t up for the task.
As a result, both Brown and Tatum feasted around the basket, which — as is so often the case when the Celtics are rolling — was beneficial in a symbiotic way for their guards and bigs.
During one important stretch midway through the third quarter, Tatum split a double team and slid to the rim for a left-handed finish. On the next possession, the Warriors hung back slightly to prevent the same thing from happening, and Tatum gamely buried a three. On the next possession, the Warriors sold out to prevent Jaylen Brown from driving to the hoop, and he swung it to Tatum, who in turn swung it to Porzingis for a 3-pointer when a harried Warriors defense broke down trying to prevent the Jays from scoring. That pushed the Celtics’ lead to 30 and put to rest any faint question as to whether the Warriors were going to rally.
Brown finished with 17 points on 8-for-14 shooting. Tatum went 9-for-20 from the field, making six of his 10 attempts inside the arc.
Is Jrue Holiday starting to find the range?
Holiday was one of the best 3-point shooters in the league last year, which hasn’t translated to this season — he’s shooting just 34.9 percent overall from behind the arc, and just 28.1 percent from the corners where he was a 60-percent shooter last year. That number is one of the most puzzling totals of the Celtics’ season so far.
In his last three games, however, Holiday is shooting 50 percent from three after going 2-for-3 against the Warriors. That seems to be in line with an encouraging trend from the veteran — he’s hitting 38 percent in the Celtics’ last 15 games.
Holiday was far from the team’s top scorer last year, but his shooting added an important element to the offense. His re-emergence would be a big boost.
A reporter asked Holiday about the team’s up-and-down shooting this season on Monday.
“That might be better for y’all,” Holiday quipped. “I don’t really know the stats and stuff like that. I think any time you move the ball, you have a better chance of making shots. Usually, you have better shots, more wide open shots, but sometimes shots just don’t fall.
“I think we do rely on our defense a lot, which is great. That’s always going to give us a chance to win.”
Holiday finished with 10 points on 4-for-5 shooting on Monday.
Kristaps Porzingis may be getting it together too.
In his last five games, Porzingis has scored 22, 19, 18, 23 and 18 points on Monday.
Porzingis got the scoring started with a pick-and-pop 3-pointer, then buried a corner triple shortly afterward as the Celtics took an 8-0 lead. Later in the game, he started moving into the paint, where he scored a couple of post-ups en route to a 6-for-13 shooting performance.
Porzingis has repeatedly said that he’s still playing himself into shape after returning from injury, and that passed the eye test as well, but he’s starting to look more like himself – a deadly 3-point shooter who is also a mismatch against nearly anyone when he can establish position in the post.
“KP’s big for our team,” Brown said. “Him being healthy, him feeling great is good for us, especially moving past the halfway point deeper into the year, a healthy KP is a good sign.”
The Celtics attacked Curry relentlessly.
Curry has turned himself into a relatively solid defender over the course of his career — he added strength so that he can battle against bigger guards, and he has both quick hands and an incredibly high basketball IQ.
That didn’t matter against the Celtics on Monday, who went up in their best imitation of a pod of killer whales trying to pull a seal off an iceberg. That offense has the dual effect of creating the types of looks the Celtics want to get as well as wearing down what is often an opponent’s best offensive option. Jaylen Brown went at Curry repeatedly, as did Tatum when he could get the switch in the pick-and-roll. Kristaps Porzingis even got a crack at it and turned it into an and-one in the third quarter.
“I’m guarding him so I’m chasing him around, but on the defensive end, making him pay as well,” Brown said. “Any time we got in transition and he was crossmatched and he was on me, trying to just make him pay. Make him work, and just making the right play, drawing the defense in, kicking it out, that led to some open shots, and just being a playmaker.”
Okay, Jordan Walsh.
With a ton of garbage time to get some reps, the Celtics reserves put together a nice holding pattern which included these two threes by Jordan Walsh that absolutely snapped the net as they went through.
Walsh’s shooting form has improved so drastically since his time at Arkansas, largely — it appears, in the limited time we’ve seen it — due to consistency and repeatability. He gets himself set and squared much more effectively than he did before, and the shot itself is more compact, which is very encouraging given how long his arms are.
Okay, Baylor Scheierman.
The Celtics rookie also made his first career 3-pointer during garbage time, much to the delight of the bench.
Scheierman hit a mid-range jumper shortly afterward and finished with five points on 2-for-3 shooting, three rebounds and one assist in four minutes.
Jayson Tatum says the Celtics aren’t bored.
After winning a title, the Celtics came into the season on fire but have slowed down a bit in recent weeks.
A reporter asked Tatum how the team avoids boredom.
“I’ve been through spurts of a season where I was trying to rush to get to the end, and skip steps and it resulted in us losing in the conference finals,” Tatum said, in a bit of honesty about the 2023 season that, frankly, is pretty interesting in hindsight. “Whereas last year we didn’t get bored, we didn’t skip steps, we just tried to get a little bit better every day, and we saw the result with that. […]
“I don’t think it’s a question of are we bored or not. It’s tough. We get everybody’s best shot. We put a lot of work in, and sometimes we don’t play as well as we’d like to, and that can be frustrating sometimes, but I wouldn’t say we’re bored or anything.”
Joe Mazzulla likes where the Celtics are trending.
“Even in the Atlanta loss, I felt like it was one of the best games we defended them,” Mazzulla said. “… You’ve just got to fight for process vs. results. I think the consistency of that could lead to further success. We saw that for the most part today as well.”
A back-to-back in Los Angeles.
The Celtics now travel to Los Angeles, where they will face the Clippers and Lakers on Wednesday and Thursday. They will close their road trip with a Finals rematch against the Mavericks on Saturday.
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