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Tatum, Celtics pull away late to beat Raptors, move closer to 2-seed: 6 takeaways
Neemias Queta made a case for Most Improved as the Celtics pulled away from the Raptors on Sunday.
Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown led a fully healthy Celtics team to a choppy-but-scrappy win over the Raptors on Easter Sunday, claiming a 113-95 victory.
Here are the takeaways.
Adding Jayson Tatum was a wild change of fortunes
Prior to Sunday’s game, Raptors coach Darko Rajaković was asked if he was looking forward to facing the Celtics now that Tatum is healthy.
“Not really,” Rajaković quipped.
The Celtics have acclimated to Tatum’s return with startlingly little friction. Fair questions could be (and were) asked about how Tatum would look next to an ascendant Jaylen Brown — now that Brown was fully realized as a 1A superstar, how would their dynamic shift?
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The answer, at least for now, is that Tatum has morphed into a triple-double threat on any given night — a stat-stuffer who makes the team better in myriad ways, but perhaps especially as a passer.
Consider this absurd assist he whipped over his head to Payton Pritchard for an open 3, which was the start of the Celtics’ onslaught that put the game out of reach.
Or this nifty pick-and-roll look he threaded to Neemias Queta in the first half, throwing the pass before the big (who we will get to shortly) actually rumbled into space.
Tatum’s passing has been otherworldly — an improvement on even last year’s improvements, which offered hints of LeBron James. Tatum has always been able to see over the defense, but increasingly, one of his biggest skills appears to be his near-photographic memory of where everyone should be, and he is proving that he can make any pass with extreme comfort.
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Meanwhile, Tatum’s rebounding numbers are through the roof. He’s averaging 9.9 per game since his return and has recorded double-digits in six of the Celtics’ last seven contests. Sunday’s game was the third time in 14 games that he cracked the teens.
Meanwhile, Jaylen Brown scored a team-high 26 points on 11-for-20 shooting and hit the Raptors with this series of moves as an exclamation mark on the Celtics’ win.
Tatum and Brown look like they are gearing up for something memorable.
Neemias Queta has made a case for Most Improved Player
We should start by acknowledging that Neemias Queta is almost certainly not going to win Most Improved Player this season. The betting odds currently favor Nickeil Alexander-Walker and Jalen Duren, both of whom have taken massive high-profile leaps this year.
Still, Queta’s improvements this season feel like they should be acknowledged somehow. He was dominant against the Raptors on Sunday, an eye-opening +30 in a game the Celtics won by 14 points. His impact was immediately apparent whenever he stepped on the floor as a pick-and-roll target and as a rim protector — 18 points on 9-for-10 shooting, seven rebounds including five offensive boards, four assists and three blocks. Queta scored 10 second-chance points, and his 18 points in the paint helped the Celtics outscore the Raptors 76-58 in the paint.
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Joe Mazzulla said Queta’s reads “open it all up for all of us, because we can run our actions.”
“We can see the 2-on-1s, we can make the right play, and he’s just been doing a great job of that,” Mazzulla said. “So yeah, it helps Jayson and Jaylen, and I think it helps our whole team as well.”
Brown concurred.
“It just seems like everything is connecting with him,” Brown said. “He’s just got a good feel for the game, and he sees where he needs to be, and it’s been really great for our team this year. It’s been a privilege to watch the growth from the start of the season to where he’s at now. It’s like night and day almost.”
Queta freely admitted that he thinks about the Most Improved Player award “all the time” and said he feels he has made a “good case for it.”
However: “That’s stuff that we can’t control,” he said. “At the end of the day, I’m just helping the team win, and that’s my main goal.”
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Brown, unsurprisingly, agrees that Queta should be in consideration.
“In my opinion, he’s probably one of the most improved players this year,” Brown said. “And I don’t know if he’s up for the award, but he should be.”
Nikola Vucevic is back
Vucevic returned after suffering the least-heralded fractured finger of all time — an injury suffered in the midst of Tatum’s high-profile return to action.
Afterward, Vucevic said he felt good and had no issues.
“To me, it was a couple things where I would’ve maybe been hesitant swiping at the ball, things like that,” he said. “But first or second play in the game, I got hit in the finger. Little bit of pain, but it went away and it was fine. So it was good to go after that.”
The veteran center looked a little rusty. He missed both of his 3-point attempts and was 2-for-5 in 13 minutes of action, tossing in a couple of floaters around the rim. He and Brown miscommunicated badly on one turnover, which was a reminder that Vucevic’s time with the team has been very limited so far.
Vucevic said “the chemistry part” is his biggest adjustment before the postseason.
“That just has to come from us playing and practicing together,” he said. “Which is good [that] I get at least these five games in before the playoffs. Then we’ll have that week between that will help.”
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The Celtics want Vucevic to feel comfortable; Mazzulla said he has no concerns about the center trying to do too much.
“If anything, making sure he’s aggressive enough to where we have the best version of him, so that we can have a different layer of what we want to accomplish is the most important thing,” he said.
The Celtics were messy in the margins
While Tatum and Brown played well in the fourth quarter particularly, they turned the ball over five times apiece — a lifeline for a Raptors team that prefers to play fast. The Celtics, who average a league-best 12.3 turnovers per game, coughed it up 15 times.
The Celtics were also at a disadvantage from 3-point range: 8-for-28 (28.6 percent) to Toronto’s 8-for-20 from deep. Those two margins often spell doom when they go against the Celtics.
However, they countered the sloppiness and poor shooting with effort: 44-31 overall on the boards (12-6 on offensive rebounds), 76-58 in the paint, and 16-9 on second-chance points.
Brown noted that the Celtics rely on getting downhill.
“That opens up a lot of our 3s, so in times that our 3 ball is not falling, we’ve got to find other ways to win,” Brown said.
“In the past, that’s probably been one of our critiques is that when we shoot a lot of threes, sometimes we don’t get to the paint enough. So to see us being able to dominate some games in the paint is good.”
Jordan Walsh offered a spark again
After Walsh’s six-game absence on a string of DNP-CDs, he has now played five games in a row, including rotation minutes in four of those contests. On Sunday, he provided a really nice spark off the bench, particularly in the third quarter when the Celtics were scuffling a bit — a steal and a slam in transition, followed by a herky-jerky drive and finish over a tough contest.
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Scheierman seems to have locked up the primary back-up wing slot in the playoff rotation, but Walsh consistently looks ready to go when he’s given a few minutes.
“That’s key this time of year,” Mazzulla said. “You want guys that you know when you put in, whether it’s five minutes or 20 minutes, you can rely on them to make plays, and he does that, especially on the defensive end.”
What’s next
The Celtics will host the Hornets at TD Garden on Tuesday, tipping off at 8 p.m. before Thursday’s pivotal contest against the Knicks in New York. The Knicks — who hold the tiebreaker — were off on Sunday, so the Celtics currently hold a three-game lead over the Knicks for the 2-seed. Both teams have four games remaining.
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