Jaylen Brown was rolling. He stepped onto the court with fresh braids and a headband for the national TV game and he was feeling himself early on. He scored one buck, assisted on Boston’s other, and seemed hellbent for more when he streaked up the left sideline and crossed over on Clint Capela.
Then … he was on the ground and in pain.
I saw it from the start to finish, and it didn't look good,” Marcus Smart said. “I thought it was his knee. With no contact, that's always scary. But as I went to go check on him, he was like 'it's my ankle, my ankle's hurt'.”
Brown managed to walk off under his own power and even lobbied to return, but the damage was done to his ankle, and his team.
“Offensively it felt like we were a little — I don’t know, shell-shocked with Jaylen going out,” Ime Udoka said. “(We) kind of had to figure out how we were going to attack it.”
Step one was a healthy dose of Jayson Tatum’s All-NBA-level performance. When one star goes down, the other has to fill the void, and Tatum did.
The rest came from a little bit of everyone. Derrick White pitched in with a nine point third quarter on a perfect 4-4 shooting and a free throw.
Then late in the fourth, it was Grant Williams with two monster 3-pointers to put the Hawks away.
“We know it's not easy for those guys to come off the bench and make the impact scoring-wise that they did tonight,” Smart said. “We understand there's going to be nights where they can't kind of do that. But for them, it's finding ways to impact the game. I think we did that tonight. We got a little bit of scoring, but everybody's playing hard.”
Boston’s bench typically averages just over 29 points per game, the fifth-fewest in the league. They scored 10 more than their average against Atlanta and the team won by nine.
“Everybody's sacrificing for the greater good of the team,” Smart said. “I definitely think the guys coming off the bench definitely helped with that and kind of got that spark going. Payton (Pritchard) came in and hit some big shots, played some really good defense and kind of got us going to get back into the game. So you gotta tip your hats to those guys."
Bench performances like this have been inconsistent at best for a variety of reasons. Injuries and COVID earlier this season pushed guys into a variety of roles to fill gaps and try to get by. Now that things have settled, the Celtics have stepped up their performances. In their four games since the break, the bench is averaging 37.5 points per game, 17th in the league.
“We've always said it with Payton in there, those are very capable guys. The rotation has been shortened but we have full confidence in those guys to come in,” Udoka said. “Aaron (Nesmith) impacted the game without making a shot tonight. He did it with his physicality, defense, energy, got some offensive rebounds. Those shots are going to fall but credit to him for being ready.”
Pritchard has stepped up in recent games, and seems to be carving out post-Dennis Schroder role on the team, but White and Grant Williams are the catalysts for Boston’s better bench performances.
Williams thrives in his role, often coming in for Al Horford and finishing games with the rest of the starters. He’s grown into a guy his teammates trust to take and make big shots, especially Tatum.
“I remember during the game I was like, ‘do you want me to cut there and make it so that (Danilo Gallinari) maybe not double?’ He said ‘no, you stay spaced and then the other guy will come on the backside and you'll be ready to shoot,’” Williams explained. “A couple years back it would have been like 'cut, get to the dunker and do something else.' So I think it's just a trust between the two of us.”
Meanwhile, White is becoming a jack of all trades for Boston, which takes some of that pressure off of Smart. White is able to move off the ball, giving Smart the point guard duties rather than Smart relinquishing the ball-handling to Schroder.
“He just made the right plays attacking downhill,” Udoka said. “They started doubling Jayson and everybody else got to kind of eat off of him, and so Derrick was huge obviously — handling, scoring, distributing, defensively, all the way around. So it was huge to have a guy like him ready on a night when Jaylen goes out.”
The Celtics can’t go too long without Brown in the lineup. If he’s out or limited against Memphis then that might be a not-so-enjoyable night. But the bench, long a weakness for Boston, is starting to benefit from the same consistency as the starters.
“Somebody goes down, somebody else steps up. It’s somebody else’s opportunity and we had Payton and Aaron come in and do that for us,” Smart said. “To be able to come out and be down the way we were, playing the way we were in the first half, to have JB go down, to come back in that second half and execute offensively and defensively, it just shows that if we continue to come out like this and this is the team that we are, it’s going to be hard for teams.”