Alright. Even I didn’t see this coming.
I’ve been preaching the gospel of patience for a long time over here. I always felt that this team had more in them than they were showing early on, and I felt pretty good during this turnaround.
But this is more than I expected.
The formula for the Boston Celtics this season was always supposed to defend well enough to make up for a lack of points scored from an offense that would struggle to score points.
At first, neither of those things was happening, but there were very understandable reasons for it. As the defense started to pick things up and they started to win more than they lost, people in my camp felt pretty good about things. They were living up to the preseason formula. Heck, they were even surpassing it some nights, which was nice to see.
However, the Celtics have continued to build on that progress at a rate that makes it seem they're living in a universe where time moves a lot faster than ours. This is what I would have predicted in maybe March of 2023, not 10 weeks after dropping to 11th in the East.
“Guys are confident, playing free, playing together,” Ime Udoka said after a thorough dismissal of the Utah Jazz. “The most clear thing you can see is obviously the ball movement, the crispness on offense and taking advantage of opportunities. I feel we are very balanced in isolation, off-ball, pick-and-roll, postups and we have a lot of versatility as far as that offensively.”
They were never supposed to be this good offensively. They have the league’s best offense since the All-Star break. They're the league’s second-best shooting team since then as well.
“Everything takes time,” Jaylen Brown said. “Everybody wants everything to work right away, but new team, new coaching staff, kind of working through some things and trying to figure some things out. Watching a lot of film and making sure we keep believing in ourselves … Nothing different, nothing in particular. Just growth, getting better.”
I want to disagree with him, but I can’t. This Celtics team didn't add any new wrinkles or plays. They didn’t sit someone and elevate someone to a starter. Yes, they traded a couple of guys away, which helped, but even that isn’t enough to be the catalyst for what we’re seeing.
What this is is what Brown said it is. They were bad at something, they looked at ways to fix it, and they eventually did.
“The defense was throwing different looks at us, and we weren’t really prepared for it,” Marcus Smart said of the team’s offensive ascent. “On top of chemistry, we had a lot of guys out, trying different matchups, lineups and things like that, getting healthy and then actually the confidence individually and togetherness that we have in each other. They all work together to get us to where we are at, the struggles we went through early on is the reason we are succeeding so much now and flourishing the way that we are.”
Another reason this offense is taking off is because of that stifling defense. That old basketball cliché about running off stops to get the offense going is true. There is no better motivator to playing defense than knowing there are points for you on the other end.
“Our assist numbers have been going up, we got 37 tonight,” Udoka said. “We will benefit from the made shot but the unselfishness is there. You see the ball popping around, guys are passing up shots and getting everyone else involved and it's becoming contagious.”
The unselfishness Udoka is talking about is easy, according to Smart.
“When we get stops on the defensive end, we have two of the best players on those wings in Jayson and Jaylen who can get out and we have got rim runners in Rob, we have one of the best trailers in Al in this game,” he said. “When we can get out and run, we just allow our weapons to be our weapons for us and it’s hard to stop everybody. You’ve got to pick your poison, and nine times out of 10, the poison that you pick isn’t good for you. So when we can get those stops, we become even more dangerous because we have a lot of space to play with in the open court.”
The deadline trades, along with a prolonged stretch of good health have certainly helped. Guys are in consistent roles now, especially Smart who is flourishing as the team’s full-time point guard. For the first time in a while, Smart and his teammate can benefit from the kind of reps that build good habits, confidence, and trust in one another.
“When you’ve got something that you’ve worked on and it works perfectly the way you’re playing for it, the confidence goes up. That trust goes up,” he said “Now you’re believing in it, and now you can go give it your all. So when we’re on that roll like that, when things are rolling the way they are for us right now, it’s only right and it’s only the way it is to go up with trust and confidence individually and together.”
The Celtics know full well what things look like when they don’t play this way. They have recent evidence of how poorly all that can go. They're winning a lot now, having lost only three times since February 1, but they haven't forgotten what they’ve been through. They know how bad that was.
Now, things are not just good, but they're better than anyone would have thought. Teams with a top offense and defense do not lose much, and they tend to still be playing when people open up their pools.
“It’s a lot of fun winning. We’re having a lot of fun,” Brown said. “We’re just taking it one day at a time. It feels great. It’s fun coming into work every day. It’s fun talking, building with your teammates. We’ve just gotta continue to get better, and that’s it, man. That’s all we can ask for; just come out, we give a great effort, play together, and see what happens from there.”