Jaylen Brown hunched over as the shock of it all set in.
The ball had just rolled off the rim. The Celtics failed to cash in on another gift from the Spurs.
“I missed -- I smoked the (expletive) layup,” he bluntly admitted after the game. F-bombs are more common now for Brown, who seems to be getting as frustrated as anyone at the Celtics' inability to make any meaningful progress right now.
“Tough loss, but we’ve got a game tomorrow so what can you say? Get ready for the next one,” He said before the Celtics' flight to New York. “Defensively, we held them under 100. Offensively we struggled at times with movement, continuity, some stuff like that. Defensively we could have did a little bit better, but holding a team under 100 is solid. Offensively we’ve still gotta figure things out now that guys are back.”
It’s pretty easy to figure this out, actually.
The goal of the offense is to make things easier for Jayson Tatum and Brown.
Got it?
Now, this can mean a lot of things. And it certainly doesn’t mean force-feed them so they take every shot, or for them to only search out their own opportunities.
“It’s about them using that aggressiveness from other teams and get other guys shots as well,” Ime Udoka said. “Teams are basically almost blitzing them, double-teaming them. They’ve got to find the pocket, find the pass. We had a few turnovers late trying to do that, but once you get it to that small or big slipping out, you’ve got numbers behind it.
“So we try to get stops and get down in transition, get fast breaks to get them easier looks. But when a team is trying to take them out of the game, they’ve got to help the others, and then guys have to make plays behind them.”
So basically, a big focus in the fourth quarter is Tatum and Brown making passes when they're double-teamed, but in tandem with that, it’s the rest of the guys moving quickly in a sudden 4-on-3 situation to burn the defense.
If the Celtics are not going to take passes from Tatum and Brown out of double teams, make quick decisions, pass and drive against a rotating defense, and make the other team pay for those decisions, then the defense will continue to double team Tatum and Brown.
That does not make their lives easier. Nor does Tatum and Brown not delivering those passes on time. The point is to punish the defense for its decisions. They need to soil themselves when Tatum and Brown pass the ball, not celebrate.
Tatum and Brown should also generally not be standing in the corner watching someone else take up an entire possession. Okay, maybe once if they need to sort of rest for a possession and someone has a mismatch, but that's about it. The rest of the time, when the ball isn’t in their hands, there should be some level of effort to find them.
“We’ve gotta keep moving, keep cutting with pace,” Brown said. “I thought in the fourth quarter we got away from what we wanted to do and stuff like that. We were rushing a little bit. We should have taken our time.”
Moving without the ball makes both their lives easier because it’s just easier to run and cut and move without having to worry about bouncing that thing. That's pretty self-explanatory, right?
If a guy can move and cut and get to the basket and THEN get the ball, that's a lot easier than having to dribble it that whole time. That requires people who are good at passing the ball to the people who are cutting.
Boston has a few such players, especially their bigs Al Horford and Robert Williams.
“I think even in this game when we went on good offensive stretches, the ball was coming from Al, coming from Rob, etc. and we were cutting, setting screens, and taking advantage of some of those actions how they were guarding us,” Brown said. “We gotta make teams pay. We can’t just be out there playing basketball, we gotta read the game a little bit better.”
It also makes Tatum and Brown’s lives easier if they were able to flip this situation, and other people could cut to the basket. Everyone likes counting assists, too, and if they had a few more of them, there would be more room for them to work when they needed to.
“There are situations where that would be beneficial for us and then there are situations where guards should have the ball in their hands,” Tatum said. “Basketball's all about reads and there can be a different read every play. NBA teams are good at switching things up, giving you different looks. So you can't just do the same thing over and over again.”
So, Boston Celtics, when it comes to running your offense, just think HDTMJTAJBLE: How Does This Make Jayson Tatum’s And Jaylen Brown’s Lives Easier? Maybe hand out some bracelets with those letters on it or something -- that's not as easy to remember as I’d hoped.
But the concept is.
Whether it’s Tatum or Brown drawing multiple defenders in an effort to punish the other team, them playing off their bigs and cutting, or them finding cutters, the entire goal is to figure out how to make plays that make their lives easier.
That means when there's a late game play and the team has shown it can execute multiple things, it’s harder for a defense to figure out how to defend them. It doesn't mean dribble the air out of the ball for 18 seconds and launch the ball. It doesn’t mean that for anyone. That makes no one’s life easier except for the opposing coach.
Everyone needs to accept this. Even though every play isn’t drawn up for Tatum or Brown, every play should be run with them in mind, because when the Celtics do something to make their lives easier -- even if it’s Tatum and Brown making it easier on themselves -- then their offense can snap into place.
"I think late-game situations are all about recognition, and recognition can sometimes be matchups, sometimes it could be moving with pace. It just varies from game to game, game-planning who we’re playing in situations, especially those last couple of minutes, time to score," Tatum said. "So just recognizing all those things, you try to take advantage of whatever is right in the moment."