Brad Stevens has made no secret about centering the Celtics system around the five best players on the roster since the start of training camp. Everything the team has done has been based around getting the best out of Jayson Tatum, Jaylen Brown, Gordon Hayward, Kemba Walker and Marcus Smart on a nightly basis.
“I think it's probably a good thing,” Stevens said of having his five best players so clear cut back in December. “I think that it's allowed us to create a system on both ends of the floor. Defensively, we have to do a lot of different things because we're smaller than we've been but we knew we were going to be smaller if we are going to have those guys on the court. I've always thought that there is no reason to be the same as everybody if you are not as good at those positions. It's better to be different and play your best guys. Those are clearly our five and our other guys have done a good job of being willing to play whatever role is asked on any given night to complement them.”
While Stevens has been working to bring the best out of those guys all season long with various lineup alignments, those five guys have not necessarily brought the best out of each other when they’ve played together. Countless injuries among the core during the regular season limited the amount of time they were all healthy in the same game to less than a quarter of the regular season. Within that span, Stevens did not try the small-ball look much. Stevens played that unit together just 21 minutes over seven regular season games however and it’s hard to blame him when you look at the numbers. The Celtics had a -21.5 net rating with that group with subpar numbers on both ends of the floor.
“That's awfully small but I think that we do have to consider that,” Stevens said of the look back in December. “I do think we will see that once we get healthy, some — I wouldn't say a lot. That would be a lot of stress on individuals if they have to guard up two or three positions each for a large amount of the game, but you certainly could see it at times.”
Even with the benefit of a training camp and some good health at the start of play in Orlando, Stevens only turned to it once during the seeding games. Boston’s best five was gashed in three minutes of play against Miami as Bam Adebayo bullied smaller C’s defenders in the post and the C’s lacked cohesiveness in that small sample size (28.9 offensive rating(!)) in what ended up being an ugly 112-106 loss.
The injury to Gordon Hayward at the start of the playoffs made the question of whether the ‘best five’ lineup should be given another chance largely moot up until his return in Game 3 Saturday night but that changed in a hurry during his appearance.
"When we got here, Kemba wasn’t practicing for the first few weeks so we never got into that stuff much," Stevens admitted.
Nice play by Gordon Hayward here. Boston is small, look at the spacing. Kemba screens for Tatum, Herro switches on to Tatum. Miami sticking with their principles of help you see Butler and Dragic at the elbows. As Tatum drives watch Hayward come set a screen for Kemba. pic.twitter.com/bJdljRyrxk
— Steve Jones Jr. (@stevejones20) September 20, 2020
Kemba is the king of stopping Heat runs#Celtics pic.twitter.com/vIyE1adGp5
— Celtics on NBC Sports Boston (@NBCSCeltics) September 20, 2020