Kristaps Porzingis could not contain his smile.
Both Payton Pritchard and the collective crowd at the TD Garden forgot that this was a perfect autumn day in New England and treated the fourth quarter of a preseason game like an Eastern Conference Semifinals game in May. Outside the Garden, people were coming home from farmer’s markets with pumpkins for carving. Inside, Pritchard was carving the Sixers' second and third string to pieces, lighting the crowd on fire.
Porzingis loved it.
“It was insane,” he said, flashing a toothy smile. “That was insane for a preseason game. I don't know what to say. It's a fun game to play in, a fun game to watch at the end when Payton was going off and the whole crowd was into it. It was just …”
He paused, let out a little ‘heh’, and smiled a little wider. “I'm very happy to be a Celtic, I'm not gonna lie.”
Considering the current state of athletic affairs in this town, this particular Celtics crowd might have had some added desperation for something worth their cheers. Porzingis’ debut is a great place to start.
The Celtics opened the game with the ball in Jayson Tatum’s hands. After a screen from Jaylen Brown and a ghost screen by Derrick White, Porizingis drifted up the right sideline to give Tatum a passing option. Tatum took that option and Porzingis cashed in on a 3-pointer. It looked like a designed play to get him a good look.
It wasn’t.
“I was just supposed to stand in the corner,” he said. “But the ball came to me, my teammates found me, and I hit the open shot.”
He hit four more open shots, got to the line eight times, and finished with a healthy 17 points in less than 25 minutes on 71.4% shooting. Tatum and Brown seemed to be making a concerted effort to involve their new big man.
“I think it kind of came natural,” Porzingis said. “When we play off of each other, handoffs, back-doors, all that kind of stuff, I think it’s just really, really hard to defend. And a lot of those times they draw so much attention that it opens the game up for myself. I think that’s what happened early on. The more time we get together playing the better reads we’ll make off each other.”
Preseason performances are usually hit-or-miss. Porzingis made his fair share of good plays but also had a few blunders. He turned it over three times and a few passes headed his way didn’t quite make it there thanks to timing issues. Nothing more practice time can’t fix.
“I think (it’s) just the guys getting used to playing with each other,” Joe Mazzula said in assessing the ups and downs of the game. “I thought we passed up some open shots, but he gives us a different dynamic, makes the game easier for all the guys and it's gonna continue to get better.”
The practice time over the next few weeks will be spent fixing defensive issues as well. Pritchard’s explosion didn’t just make the building warm and fuzzy, it erased some of the memories of Tyrese Maxey’s monster game. Maxey is a good player, but Boston’s defensive mistakes helped pave the way for a bunch of his points.
“Some of the things are pretty new to me. I’m still getting used to it, and we’re also trying some things out,” Porzingis said. The Celtics are asking him to drop back on pick-and-rolls, but the timing and the spacing are still a work in progress.
“That's something I have to get used to,” he admitted. “I sometimes stay a little bit too long helping those guys when they already can block either from behind or the side and I can get back to mine so I can box out and fight for a rebound. So that's still something that I have to kinda get adjusted to.”
Nothing is going to be determined after 24 minutes of preseason basketball, especially when there's a good chance there will be no minutes tomorrow to build on tonight. A silly three-games-in-four-nights opening to the preseason makes getting the necessary reps together a little more difficult in the short term.
But those moments will come in the coming days and weeks. We got our first glimpses of how the Celtics will use Porzingis … sometimes in the corner, sometimes as a pick-setter, sometimes as a passer. We saw them playing off one another some and, given time, they’ll start to figure out each other’s tendencies and things will start to flow more freely.
Right now all we have is these 24-plus minutes. And right now, those minutes are pretty encouraging.
“It felt good,” Porzingis said. “That was our first kind of official game together and I think it’s a first step to keep building our chemistry.”