Four areas to watch for Celtics after underwhelming preseason

Accurately evaluating NBA preseason basketball is a tough process. Guys take nights off, veterans aren’t going 100 percent and the sense of urgency to win just isn’t there for a lot of teams on any given night. All of this was true for the Boston Celtics on Saturday night, and still, something else seemed off as the team stumbled to a 1-3 overall exhibition record following a 113-102 loss to the Cavs on Saturday night.

Losing another game to the Cavaliers without the services of Kyrie Irving and Gordon Hayward was no big deal. Doing so in ugly fashion yet again, after Brad Stevens sounded the alarm on this team on Tuesday night, was a bit more noteworthy. The effort was there on Saturday, but the results remained largely the same.

"I just want to play with spirit and passion and togetherness, and we just have to find that kind of joy in playing together,” Stevens told reporters in Cleveland. "The last couple of (games), for whatever reason, have not looked like practice. For whatever reason, we’re just kinda waltzing through the motions and we’ve gotta be better than that.

"I think we’ll find out how important all these preseason games are down the road. And I don’t know that there’s an exact answer.”

Stevens has plenty of time to iron out the kinks in the next week of preparation ahead of the regular season opener against the Sixers on Oct. 16 at TD Garden. Here are a few areas that will need some additional focus over that stretch.
1. Outside shooting: The Celtics aren’t going to be shy hoisting up 3-point attempts this year. They’ve chucked up over 34 attempts per game during the preseason, which is a top-10 mark across the league and puts them 10 percent ahead of their regular season pace from last year. The problem for Stevens is that high volume shooting from downtown doesn’t look great when everyone is missing. The C’s have knocked down just 24 percent of their looks from deep, the third-worst mark across the NBA this preseason.

The biggest culprits of the early season slump? Hayward understandably hasn’t found his range yet (10 percent), but Jaylen Brown and Semi Ojeleye are both shooting 17.6 percent from deep despite attempting all four treys per game. Irving (25 percent) and Terry Rozier (22 percent) have struggled as well.

Four subpar preseason games from beyond the arc shouldn’t really be a cause for alarm. The track records of guys like Irving, Hayward and Al Horford speak for themselves from downtown. Still, given the elite marks guys like Brown and Jayson Tatum put up last season for the second-best 3-point shooting team in the NBA, some regression is a distinct possibility. The C’s took a number of high quality looks from deep that didn’t go down, but they’ve also settled for a bunch of 3s from above the break this season, particularly early in the shot clock. The numbers indicate they are better off trying to eliminate those types of attempts from their regular offense.

“We’ll go back and look at whether those were good shots or not,” Stevens said last week. “It was more of a lack of work to get a good look and I think that sometimes when you don’t work like that, the ball doesn’t go in. We’re not as good as advertised right now, so at least we know that.”  

2. Usage rates: The Celtics youngsters have plenty of confidence in the wake of a trip to the Eastern Conference Finals. Their success last year has led Stevens to give the green light on offense to the team’s young core, and they haven’t been shy about firing away early. Among the team’s regulars, Tatum, Brown and Rozier all have higher usage rates than any of the team’s All-Stars over four preseason games. That’s not a problem in theory, except for the fact that Tatum and Brown have been settling for tough shots throughout the exhibition season. Tatum, in particular, has been dreadful, taking Kobe Bryant-esque shots from the midrange that have not gone down (33 percent from the field).

While there’s no doubt that Tatum and Brown are capable, the bigger problem the C’s have dealt with early is failing to spread around shots to more efficient options. Irving has ranked sixth in usage, while Horford ranks dead last this preseason among regulars. Shying away from Hayward while he gets his feet wet is one thing, trying to do more heavy lifting than the team’s All-Stars is a bigger issue. As the regular season approaches, the youngsters need to scale back their workload a little bit and accept the fact that the team is better off with them as supporting pieces now.

3. Ball movement: This goes hand-in-hand with the usage rate problem. The C’s ball movement has been lackluster this preseason, especially for a team that has a huge chunk of its core back together. They rank 27th in assist rate during the preseason, an indication that a large section of their offense is coming via isolation sequences. The Celtics have plenty of players capable of creating their own shots, but that’s not the formula for elite offense in the NBA.

Brown and Tatum have never been known to be great passers, but they’ve transformed into ball stoppers to a degree this postseason. Marcus Morris ranks low on this list as well, and that’s no surprise given his propensity to get up shots. The Celtics are never going to be elite in this category, but they have to show more cohesiveness within their offense to unlock the best shot attempts. Good passing is a big part of that and we haven’t seen much of it thus far.

4. Defense: We already covered a lot of the issues in greater depth last week here at BSJ, and things did not change much on Saturday night in Cleveland. The Cavs made some tough shots, but the C’s were continually abused again in the pick-and-roll and other offensive sets. They ranked 22nd overall in team defense this preseason (allowing 101.5 points per 100 possessions) and that’s a far cry from where they were at this point last preseason (fifth overall, 90 points per 100 possessions allowed). The problem really isn’t in one specific area beyond fouling too much. The issue is that the Celtics have merely been average in a bunch of the four factors (rebounding, forcing turnovers, defending the 3-point line). Their coverages have not been sharp, and the effort hasn’t always been there.

The biggest problem has been the fact that they are letting teams get to the free throw line at an absurd rate. Some of that is adjusting to the new NBA rules on grabbing (the officials are calling it tighter), but the C’s have piled up fouls in penalty situations, which has opponents attempting 36 free throws per game (fourth-worst mark in NBA this preseason). Some of that will get cleaned up when the effort and intensity returns, but the C’s are still not in sync on this end of the floor either. Whether or not they will get back to the elite level they played at defensively last year remains to be seen, but the early signs are not promising.