Kristaps Porzingis’ huge night leads Celtics to blowout win over Bulls: 9 takeaways
Porzingis turned the ball over on the first possession and played an essentially perfect game the rest of the way.
Kristaps Porzingis and the Celtics drilled the Bulls 122-100 on Wednesday, bouncing back from Monday’s loss to the Rockets.
Here are the takeaways.
Kristaps Porzingis was in rare form
For the last couple of weeks, Porzingis has started to round into form, particularly in the first quarter. The Celtics like to run plays for their star big man early to get him going, and Porzingis – who somewhat candidly earlier this season admitted that he would love to get more shots, even though he understands the sacrifices necessary to win – seems to relish the opportunity.
On Wednesday, Porzingis turned the ball over on the first possession and played an essentially perfect game the rest of the way. He made 3-pointers on back-to-back possessions the next two times down the court, knocked down a jumper and another triple on back-to-back possessions midway through the quarter and finished the first quarter with 15 points. He poured in 11 more in the second, scoring 26 points in the first half en route to his season-high 34-point outpouring, which included a 32-foot bomb with 2:24 remaining to put an exclamation mark on his evening. Porzingis finished 8-for-14 from three, tying his career high, and he pulled down 11 rebounds.
The Celtics don’t need Porzingis at that level every night, but they do need him to be a punishing option when teams throw two defenders at Tatum like the Bulls did throughout Wednesday’s game. Having Porzingis fully back in form makes that strategy more or less untenable.
“It’s tough. It’s scary,” Jaylen Brown said. “When KP’s shooting the ball like that with confidence, that opens it up for everybody else. So that’s what I like to see. KP had a great game tonight. Just got to keep building.”
That’s the fully realized version of this Celtics team: A group that fills in every gap and makes each other more potent along the way.
“[Porzingis] has just been great on both ends of the floor,” Mazzulla said. “I think obviously offensively, he handles a lot of different cross matches, and he’s gotten so much better at that. His screening vs. different coverages, I think he’s playing with a great level of physicality. Defensively, he’s getting better at some of the different coverages that we have, and he’s been great.
“So it’s great to see him kind of have a game like he did tonight, and for us to have a well-balanced game as well.”
A shout out to Porzingis’ youth coach
When a reporter asked Porzingis why he didn’t get stuck under the basket as a developing player like so many tall kids, he shouted out his youth coach.
“He just saw the talent in me,” Porzingis said. “He allowed me to bring the ball up and shoot threes, just kind of gave me the green light to be my own player. Not everybody in the youth has that freedom, but I did.”
Let the kids develop how they want. They might just grow to become 7-foot-2 NBA champions.
Jaylen Brown and the Celtics hurt the Bulls in the paint
The Celtics still got up plenty of 3-pointers (18-for-44, 40.9 percent), but they also nearly matched the Bulls in the paint – Chicago’s advantage was just 40-38.
A lot of the Celtics’ production around the rim came in the second quarter when the game started to slip away from the Bulls. Jaylen Brown in particular seemed focused on patiently playing off two feet and scoring around a Bulls defense that doesn’t have a lot of answers for most teams (they have the 25th-best defensive rating in the league at 115.4) but seemed to have particularly few answers for the Celtics.
Brown hasn’t been shooting 3-pointers particularly well this season (31.8 percent), and he was 1-for-5 against the Bulls, but he took full advantage of their porous interior defense with 28 points on 10-for-18 shooting and six assists.
For his part, Brown said being home makes a difference in his physical health, since he can get in recovery work at the Celtics’ facilities.
“Just being able to be physical night in and night out, just getting my body ready to go so I can take those blows and those hits and deliver some back,” he said.
“But tonight I felt good getting to the paint. Chicago’s a physical team, but if you throw the first punch, it’s hard to recover. So I thought we came out swinging. KP came out the gate lighting them up, and we kind of just kept it rolling from there.”
Derrick White making 3-pointers is a big deal
White isn’t lighting the world on fire from 3-point range yet, but he has now gone 4-for-10 from deep in consecutive games and is shooting 38.5 percent in his last five games, which is a massive improvement – his previous games were so bad that if you back his splits up to his last 10 games, he shot 28.8 percent despite his recent stretch.
And, like Porzingis, White making his 3-pointers turns the vast majority of defensive coverages into untenable options against the Celtics. You can’t double the ball out of Tatum’s hands when White is shooting well, and you can’t collapse a second defender to contest Brown in the paint (in fact, when White is shooting well, you’d probably be better served simply letting Brown score two instead of giving up the three).
White finished with 22 points on 7-for-14 shooting overall to go with five assists.
“I don’t want to say I’m on a roll,” he said. “It’s been two games. But just trying to be consistent with my attitude and effort, like [assistant coach] Phil Pressey says, and just trying to go from there. When I’ve got opportunities, just shoot it with confidence and just try to stay in the shot. So just trying to take it one game at a time, and I think it’s all a part of the process.”
Payton Pritchard played a nice floor game
Pritchard has cooled off significantly since his burning hot start to the season – during which he looked like a candidate for Most Improved Player, not just Sixth Man of the Year – but he put together a nice performance without a huge scoring night just one game removed from making five 3-pointers against the Rockets.
On Wednesday, Pritchard was primarily a playmaker – dishing out seven assists to go with his 10 points. Pritchard forced nothing and appeared happy to get off the ball and let others do the scoring. He also was part of the second-quarter offensive attack during which the Celtics crushed the Bulls around the rim, burrowing his way to the basket in his trademark way rather than simply hoisting 3-pointers.
“I think he’s still pretty clear ahead of the back for Sixth Man of the Year, and any time he’s on the floor with me, I’m always looking to get him going,” Brown said. “I found him a couple of times tonight. Him just shooting the ball well, stretching the defense, bringing energy to the game is important for us. So Payton’s been having a fantastic year, just got to keep it rolling.”
Pritchard’s willingness to take a back seat as a scorer and become a facilitator when necessary is one of the many reasons the newly-27-year-old still has plenty of room to grow ahead of him – sometimes point guards score, but sometimes they need to get others involved, and knowing how to balance the two is valuable.
You might be sensing a theme in these takeaways – as a whole, the Celtics feel like they are pulling out of their slump a little bit. They might not reach the heights they touched at the start of the season, but if they find a happy medium somewhere between their .500 skid and their world-beater status, the guess here is that they’ll end up quite a bit closer to their lofty ceiling than their not-really-that-deep depths.
Jaden Springer keeps getting opportunities
Whether the Celtics are showcasing Springer’s best qualities ahead of the trade deadline or whether they genuinely saw his defense against Kevin Porter Jr. last week as an eye-opening performance that deserved a closer look is unclear, but he has gotten a lot more opportunities recently.
On Wednesday, Springer played 20 minutes, made a 3-pointer, pulled down five rebounds and continued to look like a potential contributor on the defensive end.
“Jayden has kind of carved that little roll out to where he’s on the floor, he just kind of brings the best out of everybody defensively,” Mazzulla said. “And having a lot of those guys I think is important, for sure.”
White was willing to take it a step further, noting how difficult it is to free a ball-handler from Springer in the pick-and-roll.
“He’s been amazing,” White said. “He just comes in and he’s great defensively and pretty much unscreenable and just pressuring the ball. Offensively, he’s shooting with confidence and just doing a lot of the little things for us. So he’s been great for us and it’s great to see him stay ready and shine when his number’s called.”
JD Davison will attend All-Star weekend
Davison has become something of a journeyman as a two-way player for the Celtics, and the former second-round pick is having a monster season for the Maine Celtics – averaging 26.5 points and 8.3 rebounds per game, as well as 1.4 steals and 1.1 blocks. He has scored 40 points in a game twice this season.
As a result, Davison was selected to be part of the Rising Stars Challenge on All-Star weekend, and he earned some lofty praise from Joe Mazzulla.
“[It’s] similar to what Payton has done over the course of a few years where every year he adds something to his game, whether it’s pick-and-roll efficiency, whether it’s his on-ball defense, whether it’s his ability to lead a team and be a point guard,” Mazzulla said. “So I just think he continues to grow and add stuff to his game year after year.”
Davison may never carve out a role for himself on a crowded Celtics roster, but his G-League performance would certainly justify a flier if an interested team started sniffing around.
Many Celtics can’t quite pronounce ‘Worcester‘
Celtics players trying (and failing) to pronounce the names of Massachusetts is, in our opinion, one of the better bits that the TD Garden in-arena operations crew does repeatedly, and midway through the first quarter, they tested the players’ ability to pronounce the name of the second-largest city in New England: Worcester.
Only Jrue Holiday utterly failed the test. Only Derrick White really got it right, and he needed a lot of tries to get there.
On the road again
The Celtics are back out on the road for a three-game trip that sprawls its way from New Orleans to Philadelphia to Cleveland on Friday, Sunday and Tuesday. Friday’s contest tips off at 8 p.m.
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