The NBA defines “wide open” shots as when the defender is 6-plus feet away.
On Jaylen Brown’s first shot of the game, the emphasis was on the “plus.”
At first blush, it seemed like nothing. The jump ball was weird, the Warriors got a little confused, and Brown broke free for an open shot. It happens.
Then on Brown’s second shot of the game, Draymond Green had plenty of time to get out to Brown. He just … didn’t.
“Honestly, I was a bit surprised,” Brown admitted after the game. “I thought it was a little disrespectful.”
The Warriors were letting Brown shoot. It was as if Steve Kerr had found an old Marcus Smart game plan and just scratched his name out and wrote Brown’s in. But looking at the stats, one might see why they went down this road.
Brown isn’t having the best 3-point shooting season of his career, hitting 34.8%. This follows a 33.5% shooting season from deep. And Brown is shooting 27.9% on wide open 3-pointers this year, an 11 percent drop from last year.
“It worked he just made the shots,” Green said. “It’s okay.”
Well, actually, Draymond, the success of the strategy is directly tied to whether the shots go in or not so you can’t really -- you know what? Nevermind. Green can tell himself whatever he needs to sleep at night. I think Joe Mazzulla’s reaction to the defense is more telling of its efficacy.
“Yeah, we were really grateful for that,” Mazzulla said of the Warriors defense. “There’s a game plan, but then when the game starts, the game will tell us what we need to do. I just kept saying thank you, and kept empowering Jaylen, and credit to his teammates for empowering him to just continue to play.”
With the game tied at 21, Mazzulla decided to test the tensile strength of Golden State’s commitment to the bit. After a timeout, the Celtics ran a play that simply put Brown in the left corner. The ball swung to him and, again, Green did little more than jab step at him.
Thwap.
After a Warriors miss, Brown brought the ball up. This time Green decided to try to contest the shot a little bit. By then, it didn’t matter. The ball bounced around the rim and in. Then the Warriors missed again, and Brown brought it up again. This time Green challenged harder. Brown didn’t care.
His 17th, 18th, and 19th points rolled in, all of them collected in just seven minutes of playing time.
“I don't take a lot of 3s for the most part throughout the season because we got enough of that,” Brown said. “I get to the paint and I usually open it up for everyone else. But if you want to dare me to shoot, we can do that, too. I thought it was a little disrespectful. But we took advantage of it and we hit them back."
They hit back alright. They closed the quarter on a 23-1 run. But perhaps most impressive is that Brown didn’t use his hot shooting as an excuse to hijack the offense. He took one heat check, but then turned his attention to guarding Steph Curry.
“I thought Jaylen handled it great,” Mazzulla said. “It didn’t affect his defense. I thought he even picked up his defense, which is huge for us. Jaylen had a great game, and it started with that.”
After Hauser hit a 3, Brown picked up Curry in the backcourt, hounded him all over the floor in the half-court, and took him out of the play. The Warriors missed, Derrick White found Luke Kornet for a dunk, and the Warriors called timeout.
And Brown stood at half court, waving his hands to the frenzied Garden crowd, imploring them to get louder. The Warriors, on their third game in four nights and lacking the energy to put up much of a fight, crumbled under the weight of the moment. This wasn’t just momentum, it was a runaway train.
The Celtics didn’t just bury the Warriors under a pile of 3s, they professionally dismantled Golden State by hitting them with everything in the arsenal. Jayson Tatum split double teams and got to the rim. White and Jrue Holiday attacked and sprayed passes all over the floor. Payton Pritchard played at a speed the shaky-legged Warriors couldn't match.
But it all started with Brown being dared to shoot, looking Green in the eye (if he could even see Green’s eyes considering how far away he was on defense) and dropping daggers.
Mazzulla loves to stress how success will look different every night. This was a new one for the Celtics and for Brown, who said he’d never been played like that defensively in his life. The Celtics rolled with it, but didn’t overdo it. They adjusted their plan but still played like themselves.
The result was another 50-point win. No team had ever done that three times in a season until now. That it came against the Warriors made it a little sweeter.
“It feels great but at the same time it’s always within humility,” Brown said. “At any given point that can be us and we don’t take the game for granted. We didn’t come out and mess around and that’s just how we show our respect to the game. We handle business and take care of it but we don’t do it arrogantly. We do it with humility. And it’s a lot of respect for the Golden State Warriors but we feel like it’s our time now.”