Picks 'n Pops: Jaylen Brown contributing, Jayson Tatum off the bench, and Joe Mazzulla gets serious

Every week I gather some thoughts about the Celtics, the NBA, and beyond and dump them here. Because I've also agreed that my not starting for the Boston Celtics is what's best for the team. 

- Jaylen Brown didn’t have a good offensive game in New York, and he made some tough mistakes in the fourth quarter, but he did have an unnoticed impact that needs to be addressed. Here’s a look at some in the final four minutes.

• He held the corner so Julius Randle couldn't help on Derrick White’s drive. White got two free throws out of that.

• His gravity at the 3-point line drew two defenders, who forgot about Jrue Holiday. Holiday made a great cut into that space, and Jayson Tatum hit him with a beauty of a pass.

• He made a nice hustle play to get back into the defensive end and track down a long rebound

• He boxed out Isaiah Hartenstein to grab a second rebound in that stretch

I’m just saying that great players who have rough shooting games can have positive impacts in other ways. So when you say they should bench a great player for some third or fourth guy off the bench, just remember that putting a guy in the game that doesn’t have to be accounted for as much as the star can have a ripple effect.

Did Brown hurt their chances of winning with the turnovers and misses? Yup. Did he help them put a 13-3 closing run together just by being on the floor? Also yup. 

- Boston’s top six guys got together at Tatum’s behest a week ago to hash out what happens when one of them goes to the bench. In the end, everyone seemed to agree that if it was ever their turn, they’d be cool with it. 

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“I voted JT to come off the bench, but it's all good,” White said. 

Good one. This is why it’s easy for Tatum to say everyone has to sacrifice. He’s the one guy who won't have to sacrifice. 

But he’s still playing along.

Let’s see if you have the stones to follow through on this, Jayson. I seem to recall you promising Jaylen a car for accidentally breaking his face last season and I don’t think that happened either. 

- Joe Mazzulla and Al Horford were both asked about Holiday drawing the assignment of defending Randle, a big, strong guy. Both started their answers by saying “Jrue is really strong” as well. Horford walked off calling Holiday a tank. 

- Can we give Mazzulla some coaching credit for the win in New York? Good decision starting Holiday and White, no hesitation bringing Horford in early when there was foul trouble, good timeout usage down the stretch (calling the one with 4:10 to get guys organized and calling two to advance the ball late), and getting Payton Pritchard in the game to draw the free throws. It was all good. 

- It’s good Boston’s window is now. In a few years Victor Wembanyama is going to put it all together and the Spurs will start rattling off another run of championships. 

- The Clippers have reportedly backed off their pursuit of James Harden. As they did, Harden suddenly showed up for work. 

I really hope the story of him having to go take care of a sick mother is true and that she’s better, but because it’s Harden and the timing of when he left and when he returned is just so coincidental, I can’t give him any benefit of the doubt. 

Now he has no choice but to play and the Sixers have no choice but to play him. The league is looking into why he missed their game in Milwaukee Thursday night, and if there's no real excuse there will be a fine handed to someone. 

Hey Los Angeles, did you see Malcolm Brogdon’s 20-point game for Portland? I double-dog dare ya to make that deal. I triple-dog dare ya. 

- This stat about Tatum is wild.

Also, he has a chance to do it again this season. If he does, he’ll be MVP.

- Restaurants are naming themselves (whatever food they serve) near me to trick Google into putting them at the top of the search results. 

1. Brilliant. Google is the most powerful entity in the world. They determine more of your life than you know. Might as well cash in on it. 

2. I’m upset I can’t do the same. “Celtics Coverage Near Me” doesn’t work. 

- My favorite part of the Kristaps Porzingis experience is all the Latvian people contacting me to tell me “Karalis” means “king” in Latvian. 

C’mon … Just let me have this moment.

- This is the city edition jersey I was talking about.

Fine, right? Just another variation of their usual stuff. If we’re gonna have 85 jerseys, why not make one a little funky? Let’s take some chances. 

- Denver’s championship rings are wild. They have a sliding out drawer that reveals their championship banner, a spinning ball, a changing background… 

Can I get a wedding ring that does this? Maybe in the sliding portion I can have a picture of myself young and in shape when I met my wife. 

Actually, no, scrap that. I don’t want to be reminded of that. Let me just do five pushups and pretend that's enough exercise. I don’t want to get too bulky, you know. 

- The Bucks did it again. First they traded for Jrue Holiday and got Giannis Antetokounmpo to sign a new contract. Then they traded for Damian Lillard and got him to do it again. 

Giannis is the best thing to happen to Milwaukee since the Shotz brewery, and he’s cooler than The Fonz. 

Thank you if you understand that reference. 

- Speaking of extensions, it’s no big deal that White didn’t sign one with Boston. Brad Stevens gets to keep an emergency trade piece in case something ridiculous and unforeseen arises (unlikely, but as this past summer showed us, also possible), and White gets another season to just play ball and prove his worth. 

Everyone in this situation is cool with it, so no need to worry.

- Shout out to Aaron Nesmith for getting a three-year, $33 million deal out of Indiana. I always thought he had some good basketball in him, and I’m glad he got to go to a better situation for him to get the minutes to prove it.

- Taylor Swift is a billionaire now. Maybe she can join the reclusive branch of the club. 

- Victor Wembanyama. 

Oh, sorry, I’m legally obligated to mention him twice in everything I do from now on.

- After all the basketball questions were done in Mazzulla’s Thursday media availability and he was off the hook, he stopped and made a passionate statement about the Lewiston shootings. I’ve included all of them here, in full context, with the follow-up questions (summarized). 

He wanted to make a statement, so here it is. 

“I'm a little frustrated that not maybe you guys in particular, but the media in general picks and chooses when we want to ask about certain things that are going on in our society. And there shouldn't be, we should always have to talk about when something's going wrong in the world today. And for us, the same thing as the Israel-Palestine situation, the Maine situation is very important. We have to talk about those things. And so I was really hoping someone would ask that, but I spent time in Portland, Maine, 37 miles from where it's at. And when you see people go through difficult situations that they didn't ask for. It's really painful. It's really hard. And so we have a really important job in society to really try to make the world a better place. It's getting really hard, but we can't be discouraged in that and just praying for all the people that are there and we got to help them get through that.”

Q: What was your initial reaction when you first heard about the shooting?

“My initial reaction was like, one, there's people that are hurt by this and they didn't ask for it and imagine how hard it would be if my wife or children were in that situation. The second one is, it's easy two weeks ago to look at a situation that's really far from us and say we don't do that. And then something like this happens, it's humbling because whether it's domestic or abroad, there are people who are making tough decisions. There are people who are doing things that aren't what's best for humanity.

Regardless of if it's in America or not, how do we work through that as humans? I think that's the question that we have to work to answer.”

Q: Would you like us to ask you more about these kinds of things?

“Yeah, I would. I think I may not have an answer to all of them, but I am keen to what's going on and I think it's a different conversation for us to have together. I'd like to be more than just basketball. I'm not saying I'm going to be a spokesperson for everything, but I think it's important to at least acknowledge the stuff that's going on because we do have a platform and especially coming out of the bubble year where you saw the impact that the NBA had, you saw the impact that the players had, that the coaches and I was still young in the league and I didn't really understand the impact that you could have.

So watching the players, especially our guys stand up for that and go through that and you see the coaches do it. It was like, hey, we got a bigger platform here. We just got to try our hardest to help with that the best we can."

Q: People say they come to sports as an escape. What’s your reaction to that sentiment?

“I'm sure it's different for everybody, you know, and I think sometimes this needs to be an escape. But I also say that like if it happens to you, then you can't escape it and can we create a level of empathy of understanding of like this is a world where something like that could happen. And so yes, we want to create an environment to where we feel that psychological safety, but we can't lose sight and be numb to the fact that once we step out of this building, we're no longer protected by that. So how do we navigate in the world like that?    

Q: People turn to public officials for change. Do you think the effort needs to be more from the ground up, grassroots change?

“I mean, that's where we get into — I'm not  —at the end of the day, there's never one way to fix a problem. So like pointing the finger and doing it one way, there’s never one way. And so to me, it's more about like, what am I doing as an individual to get better? I'm not perfect, I make mistakes but can the way we treat other people, can that just be contagious? And it's like, I don't have the power to do some of the stuff that might need for change. But I think change comes from many, many different layers and each person has a role in their change. And I feel like for me personally, that's just like how I treat people on an individual basis, not that I'm perfect, but try to be respectful and can you just pass that forward and then everybody has a role in society of trying to do what they do. And if we could just do that and keep other people in mind, I think that will go a long way. But there's multiple layers to that. You know what I mean? There's never a right or wrong way to do it.”

- On a personal note, I can’t believe we haven't come together as a country to figure out a way to stop these things. Left or right, we’re all people, and there has to be a way for everyone to find a compromise that can prevent this kind of loss of life. 

I’m not pushing any one political agenda. People need to stop retreating to extremes, look at these people mourning the senseless loss of their loved ones, and actually come together to fix it. 

We’re here talking about the Celtics and how they all have to sacrifice something so the team can win. We all expect them to sacrifice something in order to win. Why can’t we all do that in life so we can all win by feeling safe when we’re out with our families?