An early look at the Celtics rotation, and who might be shut out of regular minutes

A stream of Celtics has already filled the Auerbach Center, getting a jump on a training camp that doesn’t start for another two weeks. 

As the guys start to get themselves back into NBA shape, we are starting to look forward to how this team might start to look. One thing to start looking at is how the minutes might be distributed.

There are 240 minutes to be played in a regulation NBA game: 48 at point guard, 96 for the wings, and 96 for the bigs. A lot of the minutes are going to be obvious, but within the obvious stuff, there is room to slide minutes up or down. 

For example, the 48 point guard minutes are going to be played by Derrick White and Malcolm Brogdon. They obviously won’t get 24 minutes apiece, and they will each obviously play more than 24 minutes per game. They’ll share the floor a fair amount of the time, at which point one of them dips into the minutes of another position. 

This isn’t an exact science. 

But within this exercise, we can start to drill down where the real needs might pop up for the Celtics, and where questions will arise that need some answering. 

The 96 big minutes can be divided between Kristaps Porzingis, Robert Williams, and Al Horford. Porzingis has never played more than 32.8 minutes per game and he still has a checkered injury history. The most Williams has played is 29.6. Horford played 30.5 last year but I think the goal is to limit that a little more. 

All those numbers add up to 92.9 and I think we can all agree that those numbers should come down some. Porzingis should top out at 32. Williams should probably settle at 28. Horford should probably also drop to about 28. That leaves about eight minutes to fill. 

Boston can go one of two ways. Luke Kornet can step in for a couple of short stints and fill the gap. The Celtics will also likely run plenty of one-big lineups out there. Again, going back to the point guards, White and Brogdon combined for 54.3 minutes last year and I’d expect White to get a bunch more this season. If White is getting the 32 minutes Marcus Smart got as the starter and Brogdon sticks to his 26, that's 58 minutes of playing time -- a 10-minute overflow. 

Jayson Tatum will likely play some “power forward” minutes in the one-big lineups (like Tatum is going to change his game because there's one big on the floor), so the 10 minutes of overlapping time for Brogdon and White can push one of the bigs to the bench and some of Tatum’s minutes can count as “big” minutes. 

Tatum and Jaylen Brown’s minutes are obviously going to be high, but how high should they really be? I believe they came into last season hoping to limit Tatum and Brown after they faded in the NBA Finals, but Joe Mazzulla was desperate to do everything he could to win games so he rode them hard early in the season and didn’t really let up. 

I feel like that has to change this year. Tatum played 36.9 minutes and Brown played 35.9, a heavy workload even for young guys in their primes. Personally, I’d love to get them into the 34-minute range. I think 34.5 would be ideal, and the cumulative effect of dropping those numbers will pay off in the playoffs.

Having already established that some of Tatum’s minutes will slide into the bigs, let’s start subtracting from the overall minutes to figure out what’s left. 

One thing that stands out already is that even with reduced, reasonable minutes, there are only 27 minutes left to play here in a regulation game. We haven't mentioned Payton Pritchard, Sam Hauser, Oshae Brissett, or Svi Mykhailiuk yet, either. 

Seven guys have already been mentioned minutes-wise. A regular season rotation generally tops out at 10. 

I think one thing that has been mentioned is Pritchard getting more of an opportunity. He’ll definitely get more minutes in total this season, but I’m not sure he’ll get minutes on an every-game basis. He’ll play in the 15-20 games Brogdon misses. He’ll fill in the gaps as other guys miss time. But when the team is fully healthy, we’ll see White and Brogdon handle the ball the most, with Tatum and Brown getting reps to start the offense aside from that. 

So of the 27 minutes in a fully healthy lineup, I see it being a battle between Hauser, Brissett, and Mykhailiuk to split those. On some nights where Hauser and Mykhailiuk are both hitting, maybe Tatum and/or Brown can play 30 minutes or so, especially when there are nights we know they'll both play 40 minutes. 

Training camp will start to guide us a little on this, but I think this is a good time to start setting our expectations. Even with conservative numbers, there are four guys looking to split approximately 30 minutes per game (five if Kornet isn’t getting any rotation minutes). There will be a few surprising DNPs, including some uproar over Pritchard sitting out games again. But with seven guys obviously in the rotation, getting to a 10-man cycle will be tough, and someone will somewhat surprisingly get left out of the mix. 

Jay King of The Athletic discussed this on the new Locked On Celtics podcast. You can watch it below or subscribe on your favorite podcast app.