BSJ Game Report: Celtics 140, Hornets 105 - Celtics offense crushes shorthanded Hornets

Everything you need to know about the Celtics win over the Charlotte Hornets, with BSJ insight and analysis. 

IN A NUTSHELL

The Celtics stormed out of the gates, dropped a giant hammer on the Hornets, and never really looked back. Jayson Tatum had 22 points by halftime, 35 in the game, the Celtics moved the ball, buried shots, got up by as much as 42, and cruised to a 35 point win. 

Box Score

HEADLINES

About what everyone expected: Before the game, Hornets coach Steve Clifford kind of shrugged when talking about his team’s chances of winning without most of his good players. “Can we win tonight? Yeah. We might need a few breaks, but you never know in this league” is not the most ringing endorsement of his team’s chances. Then they hit the floor and things went south in a hurry. 

Tatum the torturer: The Hornets are not exactly the best rim protectors, but Tatum made them look especially bad. He again shot poorly from 3 (4-14), but he destroyed the Hornets in the restricted area. They had no answer for him at all.

Hot offense keeps rolling: The fourth quarter dropped the numbers a little, but the Celtics were shooting better than 67% at one point in the fourth. They went 24-52 from 3, and that includes Tatum’s 4-14 mess from deep. Meanwhile they assisted on 40 of their 55 made baskets. 

Joe Mazzulla, however, is looking at some stretches where the Hornets made tiny runs. 

“The biggest challenge is not focusing on being a disciplined team, playing harder than everybody else, and executing,” Mazzulla said. “That's a huge challenge for us. And no matter how good you are, you gotta do that. And so, great thing about tonight's game is there's plenty of possessions that we didn't execute, and so we have plenty of room to get better.”

TURNING POINT

The opening tip? OK, I’ll be more specific. Let’s go with the 24-4 run starting at the 6:37 mark of the first quarter. At that point it was 43-16 Boston and pretty obvious that Charlotte was never going to seriously challenge. 

FIVE UP

Jayson Tatum: 35 points in 30 minutes on 15-28 shooting. He was casually dominant in this one. 

Marcus Smart: A career-high 15 assists to go along with 22 points on 8-11 shooting (6-9 3pt). How are you seeing the floor right now, Marcus?

“With x-ray vision,” he said with a laugh. “Trying to at least, trying to get everybody the ball at the right time when they need it, where they like it and just to get us some easy baskets by doing that. It gets everyone's confidence up and when people's confidence is up, they tend to play a little harder on both ends of the floor. We got a lot of great players and for me to be able to just find them and that's what I'm trying to do.”

Malcolm Brogdon: 21 points, 6 assists, 5 rebounds in 22 minutes. He had a big hand in that game-breaking run in the first quarter.

Derrick White: 15 points on 5-8 shooting. Are you getting the picture here with all these stat lines? Everyone played well and shot great in a short amount of time. 

Blake Griffin: He actually set the tone early on. His hustling for offensive rebounds early on showed the Celtics weren’t coasting against a decimated, bad opponent. 

ZERO DOWN

Not in a 40 point win. 

TOP PLAYS

ONE TAKE KARALIS WILL PROBABLY REGRET LATER

- Fun times and good vibes had by all

It’s hard to believe it was only two months ago that Ime Udoka was suspended and one of the biggest questions in the NBA was how the Celtics were going to respond to this extraordinary level of adversity. 

“It's been tough. We had a lot of ups and downs we went through early on in this season,” Smart said. “A lot of people probably thought we would never get to where we're at now because of those obstacles. When you got responsibility like we do because of how we play, it's easy for you to take the foot (off the gas), especially in a game like tonight and allow that to slip up on.”

They didn’t slip up. Yeah, they had a stretch in the second quarter where they let up a little and the lead dropped below 20, but they settled back into the game and got back to flying all over the floor and, most importantly, having a lot of fun. 

“I think we enjoy each other’s company off the court. I think that’s a big piece of what the results have been on the court,” Brogdon said. “We’re a team that laughs and talks in the locker room. Everybody can laugh at themselves. We laugh at each other. We have a good time on the bus, on the road. I think you see the results during games and our trust, being able to enjoy playing with each other.”

Basketball is supposed to be fun, and the Celtics right now are basking in the joy of a 13 wins in 14 games, an NBA-best 17-4 record, and an offense that is on a historic pace. 

We can say what we want about the defense, but the 3-pointers and dunks are just more fun. When Grant Williams dove for a loose ball with the team up 29 in the third quarter, it showed a level of effort that has eluded this team in the past. When that dive led to a Smart-to-Luke Kornet alley oop, Williams and Kornet celebrated by making bird flapping gestures with their hands … Williams doing it while still belly down on the parquet. 

What was that? 

“It’s an homage to Stromile Swift,” Kornet joked. When he was jokingly asked what attributes he shared with Swift, Kornet said “Explosive athleticism. Next question.”

Smart was asked about Kornet’s athleticism and started laughing before the question was even finished. 

A year ago, in early November of 2021, Smart was sitting at a microphone bemoaning Tatum and Jaylen Brown being unwilling to pass. Now he’s flashing toothy smiles and busting people’s chops. 

We couldn't have guessed this is where the Celtics would be a couple of months ago, but this was a night where everything went right, in a season where they didn’t give in to anything that could have gone wrong.

“It starts in the locker room,” Smart said. “I’m not saying last year we didn’t have it, but we just added more of that joy. Everybody’s coming in with a positive attitude and if it’s not positive, when you see your teammates or your coaching staff down, you try everything you can to help raise that for them. When you’ve got a team that’s doing that, are happy to be around each other and happy to come in and work every day, you get the result on the court with what we’re doing and having fun with it.”