The toughest thing about these post-mortems is figuring out where to start. There are so many places to look for things that could have gone better and so many little percentages of responsibility to parse that the task can feel a little overwhelming.
All season long there are piles of things that can either be inconsequential or part of a problem, and it’s ultimately the end result that snaps things into focus. Winning a championship means certain things didn’t matter. Falling short means there is a thread to pull.
The season is like one of those artists who slaps paint all over a canvas to music. Hindsight is when they flip the canvas upside down to reveal the full picture.
One thing that stood out to me as Celtic after Celtic took the podium after their loss to the Miami Heat: This season might have been more about just keeping things together than we realized.
“We have a good group. We had a lot going on this year,” Al Horford said after Game 7. “Our guys should hold their heads high because we had a lot of adversity. In that locker room, we dealt with a lot of things. Our group was very professional all year, worked really hard.”
It started with the Ime Udoka mess and ended with going down 3-0 to Miami. Whatever happened in between is something we’ll try to figure out. But now more than ever, I think the number one issue Boston has to fix starting next season is getting everyone on the same page.
One thing playing Miami showed all of us is how organizational cohesion from Pat Riley to Udonis Haslem paid off for the Heat. The Celtics got past a messy Atlanta franchise and an even more dysfunctional Sixers team, but a team with the level of poise and focus of the Heat was too much for Boston because the Celtics just couldn't match them all game, every game.
On the court, this issue showed itself as Boston’s offense ground to a halt. The Celtics were built by Brad Stevens, on the bones set up by Danny Ainge, to mimic the 2014 San Antonio Spurs. Ahab Stevens has been chasing this white whale for a long time, and it looked like he had finally built a team that could pull it off.
They had the versatile stars in Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown who could do a bit of everything, to varying degrees. They had size when they needed it, quickness, shooting, and ball handling. The additions of Derrick White at last year’s deadline and Malcolm Brogdon last summer rounded out what looked to be a very complete roster.
Boston was capable of anything. But there were two issues holding them back: Joe Mazzulla was putting every egg into the 3-point shooting basket, and Boston’s two stars are simply not ball-moving, hard-cutting players.
The beauty of point-5 basketball is the quickness of the decisions being made. The goal is to be as egalitarian as possible, using the gravity of stars, the unselfishness of the pass recipient, and the overall ability of anyone in any position to make a play when catching the ball. That offense is all about generating open shots all over the floor, regardless of 2 or 3. That offense is about taking and making open shots, piling them up in a way that exhausts a defense and leaves them guessing, and then getting back on defense.
But today’s NBA math, the one practiced by Mazzulla, favors 3-pointers above all else. And the fact is that making 3s is a major factor in winning in today’s NBA. But too often this season, Boston players would pass out of situations hunting for the big money shots. The goal of the point-5 offense is to bend the defense out of position, create an advantage, and exploit it. The goal of Mazzulla’s offense is to expand and shrink defense until it spits out a 3-point opportunity.
Tatum and Brown are somewhat better at the latter, but not great at the former. They are not ball-movers.
They can be. They have proven that the point-5 style is something they could use to their advantage if they want, but they are primarily slow-down, find mismatches and isolate - kind of players.
Until Boston figures out which way they're going to play, they're going to keep falling short in the most difficult situations. Miami found ways to score because they put pressure on Boston’s defense and capitalized on mistakes. Boston couldn't do the same because they had gotten so Tatum-centric, once he went down, the whole thing fell apart.
That was never what this team was supposed to be. This team is deep and versatile. Tatum and Brown are supposed to thrive off that because defenses should never know which Celtic will bury them. Instead, Boston’s offense boiled down to one guy making so many plays for everyone that everyone else forgot how to make plays for each other.
And worse, they could never truly rely on their defense to bail them out and generate easy points. Getting everyone on the same page means finally deciding once and for all if this team will be more defense or offense-focused.
Mazzulla is clearly an offense-first guy, but after the Game 7 loss, it seemed like the Celtics wanted to go back to the old way of doing things.
“I think we're at our best when -- and I think these last three games, besides tonight, we really honed in on the defensive end,” Tatum said. “We showed how special and good that we can be as a unit. We didn't shoot the ball necessarily well, but that's part of being in this league. Offense fluctuates through, from night to night. But defense can always, for the most part, maintain. Even when we miss shots, you still got to lock in on the defensive end. And, yeah, even tonight, they had 50 points at halftime. Obviously, the game got away at the end. But defense is obviously extremely important.”
He wasn’t alone.
“Defense has allowed us to get to this point,” Brown said. “Offensively we didn't play our best and defensively we were decent tonight, not good enough, but offensively just seemed like we couldn't hit a shot, and it just put more pressure on our defense. We had a bunch of good looks and nothing went in. We all got to sit back and reflect from that.”
Brogdon was asked, “How big of an issue was (losing the defensive identity) for this team this year?”
“It was the issue,” he said. “I think this was a team in the last year that prided themselves on defense. I think defense was our calling card. This year, offense was our calling card. I don't think you win championships with a high -- with a better offense than you have a defense … you can talk about the ways we can score, our versatility on offense, really 1 through 7, 1 through 8. But defensively, I thought we had the versatility, I thought we have the talent defensively. But in any given night we would let go of the rope and have a lot of breakdowns on that end.”
Before we dive into the specifics about what this team needs to do this offseason, the team needs to get everyone on the same page this summer. Stevens, Mazzulla, Tatum, Brown, and whichever other key player remains all need to sit in a room and air out their thoughts. This is the time for candid discussions in an environment where everything can be said without things being taken personally. This is the time to figure out, once and for all, who this team is.
When I say “Miami Heat,” you know exactly what you’re getting. When I say “Boston Celtics,” no one knows what’s coming. That's why one team is still playing and the other isn’t.
This team needs to walk into the 2023-24 season with a solid identity from top to bottom. They need to walk into camp on the same page, and they need to end their season the same way. Before any other moves are made, this has to happen.
If it does, then maybe important lessons can be processed and learned. If it doesn’t, then we’ll just have to rely on the raw talent overcoming shortcomings and miscommunications.
There are only so many chances left. Boston can’t afford to blow any more of them.