Derrick White’s late heroics lead Celtics over Nuggets: 8 takeaways
The Celtics were able to avoid blowing a 20-point lead for the second straight game due to some clutch shot-making.
Derrick White and Jaylen Brown led the Celtics to a 110-103 victory over the Nuggets on Sunday afternoon, snapping a two-game losing streak with a marquee win.
Here are the takeaways.
1. Derrick White: Big shot maker
White does a lot of little things really well for the Celtics, which makes his big shot-making feel even bigger in comparison.
On Sunday, White was one of five Celtics players to hit double digits, but he had a largely normal statline – 17 points, 5-for-11 from 3-point range, three rebounds, two assists, and two steals. He also had no turnovers, which meant that his two steals translated to two entire extra possessions for the Celtics, and his defense was typically solid overall, but nothing about his game was over the top with one exception: He made some really important shots.
Four of White’s five 3-pointers came in the second half. One, with 11:06 left in the fourth, pushed the lead from four to seven. Another, with 3:19 left, countered a triple by Christian Braun that cut the lead to five. Finally, his offensive rebound and ensuing floater with less than a minute left pushed the Celtics’ advantage back to five after Jamal Murray cut it to three.
“Talk about the guy that just kind of saved the day for us time and time again, it’s Derrick,” Al Horford said. “Early in the fourth, he hit a tough 3, guy coming at him, top of the key, JB finds him and he just finds a way and he knocks it down. It’s such a tough shot.
“Then at the end there when we needed a basket, he gets a 50/50 ball and puts it up and just finds a way. He’s just a winner so he just finds a way, and we’re very, very lucky to have him here.”
When White gets a big opportunity, he tends to make the most of it. This season, he’s shooting 54.5 percent from the field in clutch moments, and 50 percent from behind the arc. He has committed just one turnover. His individual net rating – which admittedly is a little tricky given the small sample size of clutch minutes – is +28.7.
White isn’t the Celtics’ go-to scorer – when the clock is winding down and the team needs a bucket, Jayson Tatum is usually the first option in isolation (which, given his 85th percentile isolation stats, is fair), and Jaylen Brown is usually the second option, which is also abundantly fair.
But White continues to prove himself a pretty unshakeable option, and his reliability helped the Celtics break their mini-skid on Sunday.
“Most of the time I start the fourth and just try to be aggressive and pick my spots,” White said. “I think each game is a little bit different and you kind of just have to read it, but my teammates and the coaching staff really trust me, and so that kind of gives you the confidence to go out there and be aggressive and take and make some big shots.”
2. Jaylen Brown still shooting well
Brown had an efficient game (22 points on 15 shots) as Tatum struggled, which was especially important as the Celtics raced out to a big lead. Brown attacked mismatches hard and got to the free-throw line nine times, where he made eight of his attempts.
He also made his first two 3-point attempts, finishing 2-for-4 from deep. In his last 10 games, Brown has shot 37.5 percent from deep on 4.8 attempts per game. In a down season from behind the arc (32.7 percent for the year), Brown’s recent stretch of good shooting is a nice sign for the Celtics.
Brown finished with 22 points, five rebounds and eight assists – carving up the Nuggets defense off the dribble and then dumping off passes to teammates when help defenders collapsed on him. He finished the game +10 in the box score and – from an eye test perspective – looked like the Celtics’ best player for lengthy stretches.
“I’m just using my size, using my strength, just getting to my spots and raising up,” Brown said. “Tonight, I had a couple that missed, that went short. My knee has been bothering me a little bit. But any time I get two feet in the green and I can just rise up, I think I’m one of the best in the game at that.”
3. Al Horford still has it
Horford will turn 39 in the Finals if the Celtics make it that far, and he certainly can’t be relied upon every night any more, but when the Celtics need him, he still seems to consistently answer the call at a very high level.
With Kristaps Porzingis and Jrue Holiday still missing from the lineup, the Celtics really needed a good performance from Horford against one of the greatest players in NBA history, and Horford answered. Nikola Jokic was excellent – 20 efficient points, 15 rebounds and nine assists – but he didn’t entirely dominate the game. Horford, meanwhile, gave nearly as good as the Celtics received – scoring 19 points on 7-for-12 shooting (including a 3-pointer) to go with eight rebounds and three steals.
“I think every game he brings it, but he just kind of had that edge today,” White said. “I feel like when he’s saving the ball or creating extra possessions for us, that’s kind of like when you notice it.
“But we definitely had that mindset and we did a better job than we have in the past of finding him, and he made big plays for us on both sides of the ball.”
A lot of things have gone right for the Celtics over the last few years – Jayson Tatum developed into one of the best players in the world, Holiday shot 60 percent on corner 3-pointers last season, White turned into one of the league’s pre-eminent role-player shooters, Joe Mazzulla’s particular brand of madness seems to fit the team perfectly, and the Celtics drew one of the most favorable Finals matchups of all time in their quest for a title last year.
But one often-forgotten break the Celtics have gotten is Horford’s remarkable longevity. Having a two-way floor-spacing center of his quality is rare and should not be taken for granted, because while none of this level of Celtics’ dominance will last forever, Horford is bearing down on 40, and his ability to keep up this level of play might quietly be the most improbable.
4. Jayson Tatum had an off night (but also nearly a triple double)
Jayson Tatum followed up what was nearly a marquee performance in a win on Friday with much less impressive effort on Sunday, shooting just 4-for-15 from the field overall and 1-for-7 from behind the arc. The Nuggets threw plenty of defensive attention at him, and Tatum was happy once again to get off the ball and allow his gravity to benefit his teammates – he finished with seven assists to go with his 16 points and 11 rebounds, and especially in the first half, the Celtics scored several baskets after swinging the ball once or twice after Tatum’s initial pass.
Tatum is important enough for the Celtics that even on an afternoon when he shot 26.7 percent from the field and turned the ball over six times, he was still largely helpful and flirted with a triple-double.
5. Neemias Queta got an opportunity
With Porzingis sidelined and two bigs in the starting lineup, Neemias Queta received 16 minutes of playing time.
As is so often the case with Queta, he scored efficiently (eight points, 4-for-5 shooting), grabbed a ton of rebounds (10), committed a bunch of fouls (four), and generally was both good and bad on both ends.
“It was his rim protection, it was his screening on the offensive end of the floor,” Mazzulla said. “But he just allows you to coach him. He doesn’t make an excuse. I kind of hold him to a standard whether he’s played one minute in a week or whether he started for us, and he wants that. He knows he needs that.”
6. The Celtics didn’t talk about Jokic before the game
After Sunday’s game, a reporter asked Joe Mazzulla what they did to prepare for Jokic.
Mazzulla’s answer? They didn’t.
“It’s not about him,” Mazzulla said. “It’s about controlling all the other stuff that you can control.”
To Mazzulla’s point: Dealing with Jokic is essentially an impossible task, something largely out of the control of any team. Instead, Mazzulla said, they focused on trying to limit cuts and transition opportunities. Defensively, the Celtics essentially gave Russell Westbrook and Christian Braun whatever shots they wanted. Offensively, they attacked Jamal Murray whenever possible (successfully at times, but with less impressive results than their work against the likes of Darius Garland).
“I think he’s a good defender,” Jokic told reporters afterward of Murray. “He’s not a target for sure, but I think we collectively need to give him a little bit of help if someone is backing you down who’s taller and maybe stronger than you. So we need to have someone to be there. […] We cannot just leave the guy on the island.”
7. Sunday’s game mirrored Friday
As the Celtics ran out to a big lead early, Sunday’s game started to feel a little uncomfortably similar to Friday’s loss to the Cavaliers, although complaining about it seemed silly (“would you rather go up by 20 or not go up by 20?” is kind of an absurd hypothetical).
But the parallels didn’t end with the early lead. Like the Cavaliers on Friday, the Nuggets won the end of the second quarter, pulling a 20-point lead back to 11 before a last-second basket gave the Celtics a 13-point advantage at the break.
The Celtics came out of the break firing and pushed their lead back to 20, but like the Cavaliers, the Nuggets started slowly walking the lead back down, boosted by Murray’s resurgence – another guard who often gives the Celtics fits.
The biggest difference? The Celtics’ defense clamped down enough to keep the Nuggets from making up the rest of the difference. Murray’s second half was a flare gun compared to Donovan Mitchell’s nuclear explosion on Friday, and White held the Nuggets at bay.
A break and a back-to-back
The Celtics now have two days off to recuperate before the Trail Blazers visit TD Garden on Wednesday. The 76ers will be in town Thursday before Saturday’s A1 showdown against the Lakers in Boston.
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