Derrick White breaks out of slump, helps Celtics end road trip strong vs. Mavericks: 9 takeaways
Boston finished its West Coast roadtrip 3-1.
Derrick White and the Celtics put together a 122-107 win over a competitive-but-shorthanded Mavericks team on Saturday, closing their road trip 3-1.
Here are the takeaways.
Derrick White got the kind of game he needed.
White started off the season doing his best imitation of prime Steph Curry, which is only a slight exaggeration — he shot 47.4 percent from deep in October on 7.6 attempts per game, and he shot 40.3 percent on 9.6 attempts in November.
In December and January, however, White’s shooting has cratered — over the Celtics’ last 11 games, White shot 30.1 percent from deep. The looks are just as clean as ever, but White seems to have lost his touch for a couple of months. The drop off from the start of the season by one of the most important players on the Celtics is one of the simpler 1-to-1 explanations of the team’s recent struggles.
On Saturday, White started slow — 1-for-7 in the first half, and 1-for-5 from 3-point range. He seemed to be scuffling his way into another tough shooting night.
In the second quarter, however, White showed a little spark. With four minutes remaining in the quarter, he missed a corner triple and held his follow through, looking a little frustrated.
Payton Pritchard, however, flew in and grabbed an offensive rebound. He threw the ball straight back to White, who fired up another three. This time, as White held his follow through, the ball dropped through without touching the rim.
“I made the one in the corner, and I think the whole team, they were behind me and supporting me,” White said afterward. “And then [Celtics assistant coach] Phil [Pressey] said, ‘It just takes one to get hot.
“So I just kind of had that mindset and finally made some, so that made me kind of happy.”
That little bit of success seemed to spark something for White, who came out of the halftime locker room firing. White exploded in the third quarter, scoring 16 of his 23 points on 6-for-9 shooting overall and — crucially – 3-for-5 from behind the 3-point line. White finished 7-for-16 from the floor with five rebounds and four assists.
Early in the season, White’s performance prompted (and deserved) All-Star chatter. That tailed off with his shooting slump, and at this point, the Celtics will almost certainly have just the two All-Stars — Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown.
Still, White’s importance to their performance on both ends is hard to overstate. He’s one of the best guard defenders in the league, and that hasn’t really slipped much, but when he’s a good 3-point shooter, the Celtics look like real contenders again.
“There’s a lot of factors,” White said when asked about his struggles. “Obviously, [Kristaps Porzingis] comes back and it kind of changes some things. And also, I’ve shot it like crap. So, those two things come together and you don’t score very many points.
“So I’ve just got to continue to do what I need to do and just know that it’s going to turn.”
White’s teammates love him.
White is a very popular teammate, which comes through when you listen to just anybody talk about him. Mazzulla talks often about telling White that he loves him.
“I think that’s the best way to get him looks is to empower him and make sure that he’s aggressive,” Mazzulla told reporters. “I love watching him do that. It’s great watching his teammates empower him too, because they know that we need him. So it’s nothing more than just continuing to make sure he finds ways to be aggressive.”
Porzingis noted how much better the Celtics are when White is at his best.
“D-White is so good,” Porzingis said. “Like sometimes maybe he lost a little bit of rhythm, which can happen, and I think today we saw a couple threes he hit where it was like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s D-White when he’s in a rhythm,’ and it’s always good to see that.
“We’re a different beast when D-White gets going, and he starts hitting floaters, threes, deep corner threes. He’s hit so many daggers for us that bring us to another level.”
The Celtics’ rim protection was excellent.
Having Kristaps Porzingis back really does make a big difference.
The Mavericks smoked a lot of layups around the rim, but the Celtics had a lot to do with that. Dallas shot just 51.1 percent around the rim (league average is 59.3 percent). Porzingis swatted two shots and changed a number of others, and Luke Kornet defended the rim well in his 16 minutes as well (and was a team-high +21 in the box score during those minutes).
The Mavericks only attempted 22 3-pointers. Kyrie Irving is an unbelievable tough shot maker, but the Celtics’ defense can give itself a gold star for limiting the Mavericks so significantly in the two most efficient areas for a team’s offense.
Good rim protection sometimes leads to good highlights.
Give Luke Kornet his flowers for being willing to challenge this dunk attempt by Quentin Grimes.
And, of course, it’s important to give Grimes credit for one of the better dunks we’ve seen this year, which is precisely what Kornet did — patting Grimes on the backside twice after Grimes yapped directly into his shoulder.
To be clear, if you dunk like that, the opinion here is that you have yapping privileges. Grimes got Kornet pretty badly. If we were in charge of the NBA’s dunk scores, that would be over 100.
On the other hand, bigs are expected to challenge dunks, which means if they are doing their job, they will occasionally get dunked on, and Kornet — perhaps more than anyone else in the league — seems to have the kind of self-deprecating personality that can accept being dunked on with the requisite good humor to deal with it and challenge the next one.
Kornet finished with 10 rebounds and five assists in his 16 minutes.
The Celtics made 20 3-pointers.
As the Celtics slump, their 3-pointers have fallen off quite a bit. In the last 12 games, they have made 20 just twice (and they made 20 in four of their previous five before that). This season, the Celtics are now 15-1 when they make 20 or more.
The best shooters were not Jaylen Brown (0-for-5) and Jayson Tatum (4-for-12), which aligns with how the season has gone when the Celtics are at their best — Brown and Tatum handle the lion’s share of the creation and are crucial for generating threes, but the likes of White, Jrue Holiday, Payton Pritchard and Sam Hauser handle a lot of the 3-point shooting.
On Saturday, Holiday shot 5-for-10 from deep (and he’s up to 48.1 percent in his last five games). Kristaps Porzingis went 3-for-5, Pritchard was 2-for-4 and Hauser — shooting with the kind of fluidity that suggests a big stretch is looming — went 2-for-3.
As a team, the Celtics finished 20-for-52 (38.5 percent). If they can take 38 percent 3-point shooting home from the road trip and keep it going for the next couple of weeks, they could ride a really nice stretch into the All-Star break.
The Celtics barely turned it over.
The Celtics had a real chance to set their season-low for turnovers, entering the fourth quarter with just two. Previously, they’ve turned it over four times in wins over the Timberwolves and Knicks, as well as their December loss to the Bulls (which was marred by 25 percent shooting from three).
In the fourth, however, Porzingis traveled and Tatum was harassed into dribbling the ball out of bounds before Jordan Walsh stepped on the sideline in garbage time, giving the Celtics five.
Still, the Celtics outscored the Mavericks 21-10 in points off turnovers, which accounts for all but four of the final point differential.
A Finals rematch … sort of.
The Mavericks were without Luka Doncic and Derrick Lively (incidentally, two of the Celtics’ favorite defensive targets), so Saturday’s game didn’t really feel like a Finals rematch.
Still, it gave Tatum a chance to reminisce postgame about his favorite memory in the Mavericks’ arena, which — predictably — was Game 3.
“Sharing that experience with my family, Deuce was there, that was just a hell of a feeling,” Tatum said.
A look back.
So what do we make of the road trip?
On the one hand, the Celtics looked deeply unimpressive in Los Angeles, and their single loss was their worst of the season to their rival Lakers. The Celtics set themselves up for their loss to the Lakers by frittering away a six-point lead with just over a minute remaining against a Clippers team that was without any of its stars, letting Derrick Jones Jr. take them to overtime.
On the other hand, the wins that sandwiched their time in Los Angeles — a 40-point victory against the Warriors and Saturday’s Finals rematch — were by far their most convincing, and Saturday in particular felt like a nice one for players like White (who has been in desperate need of a get-right game or two) and Holiday (who continued to trend upward).
The Celtics might not have fully regained their form from the start of the season, but they have rallied facing difficult circumstances now in two separate four-game road trips and went 3-1 in both. That’s not a bad result.
“I just liked the mental resilience that we continue to build through good and bad,” Mazzulla said. “I think we started both [road trips] out 2-0, lost the middle game there and were able to bounce back at the end. We’re taking in everything we need to learn, and the guys are sticking together. So that’s important.”
As the Celtics seem to do often, Porzingis offered up an animal analogy.
“We were a lion last season, and some games this year, we’ve looked like a house cat,” he said. “We want to have that spirit as a team this year.
“And it’s tough, obviously, we can’t trick ourselves and make it like it’s playoffs every game. It’s tough. It’s human nature. But we know the group that we have, and we know that we’re going to bring it to the big games, but we need to bring it consistently, and keep building on top of good wins like tonight.”
A look ahead.
The Celtics can now head back to TD Garden for games against the Rockets and Bulls on Monday and Wednesday respectively. They have a game every other day from now until Feb. 12 when they play their final game before the All-Star break.
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