The Boston Celtics are winning a lot more these days, looking and playing like a totally different team than the one that has hovered around the .500 mark most of the season.
It’s easy to point out how Jayson Tatum has played like a top-10 player during this current run of success, or how Jaylen Brown’s impact and efficiency at both ends of the floor has produced performances seldom seen.
But if you’re going to do a biopsy on what’s at the root of this Celtics resurgence, it has been fueled by their back-to-the-future brand of defense.
Regardless of who Brad Stevens threw out there, the one thing you could count on with his teams was that they would play great team defense … until this season.
Far too often, they have locked into playing isolation, one-on-one basketball offensively, and forgetting that there was another half of the court that needed tending to. The result was a lot of poorly played defense that no longer created gridlock for opposing teams looking to navigate their way towards a high-scoring night. Teams had an across-the-board EZ Pass to score on a porous Celtics defense.
So what happened?
• Effort more than anything else appears to be at a much greater, more consistent level lately. Boston has a 16-5 record this season when limiting teams to shooting 44.9 percent or less from the field. Of those 16 wins, three have come during their current winning streak. The conversation and questions about effort are surprising when you consider how Brad Stevens-coached teams have played in the past.
• Boston has spent a large chunk of this season ranked in the bottom-tier of NBA teams when it comes to defensive rating. But a series of stronger-than-usual performances have lifted them up to the 12th spot with a 111.5 defensive rating. The rating itself isn’t all that important because all NBA teams appear to have opted out for the most part, in playing elite defense this season. More telling is how their defense compares to their NBA contemporaries, which is well below where this team usually sits. Each of the last three seasons and four of the last five, the Celtics defensive rating has stood no worse than sixth in the league. In the month of April, Boston’s defensive rating ranks sixth in the NBA.
• Boston has also done a much better job of controlling the boards. For the season, the Celtics rebounding percentage (.510) ranks 11th in the NBA. In April, only the Denver Nuggets (.549) have a higher rebounding percentage than the Celtics (.527). Certainly, the insertion of Robert Williams III at center has been a factor. But a low-key contributor to Boston’s rebounding success of late has been Kemba Walker. In the four games Walker has played in during the team’s five-game winning streak, he has averaged 5.5 rebounds per game – nearly two more than his season average.
• Boston is also doing a better job during its current winning streak of closing out defensively and forcing teams to take more shots with a defender nearby. During the team’s current streak, Boston’s defended field goal percentage is .441 which ranks fourth in the NBA, a noticeable improvement from their season average (.463) which ranks 12th in the NBA.