How Brad Stevens pushed the right buttons for shorthanded Celtics in win over Mavericks

The news came in around midday on Wednesday that Gordon Hayward would no longer be available for the evening’s matchup against the Dallas Mavericks due to a sore left foot. Hayward traveled with the team to Dallas and attended shootaround but was a late scratch after feeling some lingering pain despite five days off and a cortisone shot.

“He’s been dealing with a little bit of foot soreness for really since before he hurt his hand – nothing big,” Brad Stevens told reporters in Dallas. “He came back and played through it, he felt fine playing but not perfect, so he went in Friday and got it looked at. Each day didn’t feel quite as good, and today felt worse than the other two. We’re hoping it’s just taking a little longer to settle in.”

While a second MRI has been ordered to rule out anything major for Hayward back in Boston (he also had one three weeks ago), the Celtics found themselves with a tall task on Wednesday night without Hayward. The visitors would be down to 11 active players without the swingman, Marcus Smart (eye infection), Rob Williams (hip edema), and Vincent Poirier (broken pinky). With Semi Ojeleye inserted into the starting five for Hayward, Boston’s bench consisted of Enes Kanter, Brad Wanamaker, and four rookies, two of which had combined to play five NBA minutes (Tacko Fall and Romeo Langford).

Still, the Celtics managed to overcome those limitations and leave Dallas with their first road victory of the year against an above .500 team, a 109-103 victory. The credit for the win begins with Boston's three potential All-Stars. Kemba Walker was sensational with 13 of his game-high 32 points in the fourth quarter. Jaylen Brown added 26 points and Jayson Tatum chipped in with 24 as the scoring trio accounted for over 75 percent of the C’s scoring.

There had been similar combined production from that trio on other road swings (most recently Indiana) but the C’s failed to close the deal in a lot of those contests against tough opponents. A key adjustment made by Stevens in the second half of this contest proved to be a critical difference in changing the complexion of the game and it all started with putting his All-Star point guard in a familiar situation.

For weeks, Stevens has had to mix and match with lineups that featured limited firepower with Hayward sidelined over the month of November. One of his favorite looks has been a Tatum-plus-bench-players grouping and Stevens turned to it again early in this one. Like last week in Indiana, it was a dead-end offensively. The unit combined for just five points in the first five minutes of the second quarter as Walker and Brown rested, setting the stage for a 10-point deficit late in the second quarter.

The Celtics chipped away at the deficit with Walker/Tatum/Brown back together, trimming it to five at halftime but still found themselves down four with just over four minutes remaining in the third quarter and some big bench minutes looming. At this point, Stevens made the choice to buy some rest for Tatum and Brown by essentially sending his entire bench to play with Walker (Kanter, Wanamaker, Green, G. Williams) for the final four minutes of the third quarter.

The choice was a savvy one by Stevens. Walker has a history of carrying weak offensive weapons for years in Charlotte and the Celtics drew from that during this critical sequence.

“With Kemba’s ability to play off simple actions, we can play off simple actions and guys can just space and play off of him,” Stevens said. "You might have guys playing a little bit out of position or in spots they weren’t going to play normally, so they may not be as good at running all of our stuff as some of the guys who play more often.”

The decision paid dividends immediately as the C’s not only survived those minutes, but they thrived in them, closing out the quarter with an 11-4 run to take the lead. That set the stage for Jaylen Brown and Jayson Tatum to return to the game together in the fourth quarter, where both youngsters took the offensive baton from a resting Walker and maintained the momentum midway through the fourth quarter when the All-Star returned.

Another key tweak Stevens made in the second half was simply sticking with Brad Wanamaker for big minutes as another offensive threat/ballhandler on the floor over Ojeleye. Wanamaker’s box score was rather ordinary (7 points, 3 rebounds, 2 assists) but he helped set the table for some contributions from Kanter (7 points, 13 rebounds) and Williams (7 points) and played 16 of the final 18 minutes. On shorthanded nights like this for Boston, picking the right pieces to roll with is essential for Stevens given the team’s limited margin for error and he did just that in this one by going with Wanamaker over Ojeleye down the stretch. That combined with the Williams/Kanter combo (+50 net rating in 14 minutes) provided a well-needed boost for a bench short on reliable talent.

Those on-the-fly adjustments plus some timely scoring from Tatum, Brown, and Walker in the second half when all three were in the game was a winning formula on a night where the C’s didn’t play particularly great on either end of the floor (40 percent shooting on offense, lackluster D at times).

“I thought (Walker), Jayson, and Jaylen all got really timely baskets,” Stevens said. “And it makes them decide – when they put (Dorian) Finney-Smith on Kemba, that’s a decision that takes a big wing off of Jaylen or Jayson. So Jaylen can get some of that stuff at the rim. Jayson was able to get some stuff in the paint and at the rim.”

“You just gotta play the game. That’s what I was doing," Walker added. "They were blitzing me, I just wanted to make the right play. I wasn’t going to force it at all until later when they kinda couldn’t blitz me because Jaylen and JT, they were getting off, so it just kinda made it tough on them to blitz. If they did, then those guys would have an advantage. It just opened things up for me.”

The hope now for Stevens is he doesn’t have to do much more mixing and matching like this for long. Smart is expected back in the next week as he’s feeling better while Hayward’s return timetable remains murky until those MRI results come in. Some extended rest may be necessary for him based on how long this soreness has lasted and that will force Stevens to get creative once more with a bench that is short on reliable and healthy bodies. He needs to maximize his personnel in situations like this and he did that as well as any game all year in Dallas in the face of challenging circumstances.

“It’s going to take a lot – everybody,” Brown said. “As we play different teams we’re going to have to figure out different lineups. We figured it out today and we got the win.”