Picks 'n Pops: Knee pain, Draymond Green's inspiration, & legitimate assists

Every week I gather some thoughts about the Celtics, the NBA, and beyond and dump them here. Because I've been using a torpedo bat for two weeks and it hasn't worked out the same way for me. 

- It’s obvious Jaylen Brown is going to continue playing through his knee issue. The team keeps saying “knee impingement” on the injury report, but in a recent update, they characterized it as a bone bruise. 

Two things: First, if all it is is pain tolerance from here on out, then Brown playing doesn’t matter. In fact, these two weeks can be valuable for experimenting with how to play a modified version of his game to take some of the pressure off his knee. 

Second, my biggest fear is that he tries to do too much with the left leg and develops some kind of issue there. 

- I don’t believe Brown when he says the 65-game threshold isn’t part of why he’s playing. We're going to find out the truth by how much he plays over the next couple of weeks. Regardless, I think it would be totally fine if he missed the first round of the playoffs. They don’t need him to beat whichever team comes out of the play-in, and missing the first round would give him three weeks off. 

- Bill Chisholm was at the game against Miami on Wednesday night but there was no media availability. I think that's weird. He basically did state media after the bid was accepted, then a bunch of stories came out that questioned his ability to pay for the team, and now he’s not available. 

Rich guys buy teams because they can, and when they do, they like to flaunt it. I can’t shake the feeling that something doesn’t add up here. 

- No one has hit more 3-pointers in a Celtics regular season than Derrick White. After he broke the record, he said he never thought he’d get to this point.

“After the (2022) Finals, I feel like that was the biggest summer of my life,” White said. “How I was being guarded, on that stage, it was like one of the lowest points. I told Draymond (Green) after the Olympics that he kind of changed my life because they weren't guarding me. So I had to go into that summer, and me and my trainer just focused on being consistent.”

I love this quote. He took a low point and spun it into record-setting shooting. Now if you leave White open, he’s going to bury you. His shooting ability has been one of the Celtics’ biggest cheat codes. 

- Erik Spoelstra on spending the summer with three Celtics at the Olympics: “I hated myself for actually liking them and then admitting it I hated myself even more. They’re just quality human beings. Great competitors, great basketball players.”

There's no truth to the rumor that the collective pained sigh from Heat fans in Miami spawned the first Atlantic hurricane of the season. 

- After the win over Memphis to go 6-0 on the road trip, Joe Mazzulla thanked the Celtics, in part, for “practice doing s*** that doesn't make sense.” 

I asked him what it meant to him to have a locker room full of established guys buy into practicing things that don’t make sense:

“I think it just shows the commitment to winning that they have, and the commitment to getting better. And you've seen guys in this locker room who've extended their careers, but also reinvented their careers, doing different things. They're very open-minded to the competitive approach, but also to the idea of this may help us now, it may help us in the future. It also adds another layer to either the game individually or the game as a team. And so I thought they did a great job of that. And we're just grateful as a staff that we're able to coach them.”

That last bit is the biggest thing. The NBA is full of great coaches. The best get their chances if the players allow the coaching to happen, which is on both the coach to present it in a way to get the buy-in, and the players to be humble enough to accept it. 

- Those last three bullet points should highlight how incredibly professional this roster is. I don’t care that they're a little boring and they make my job of creating Celtics content a little tougher. This locker room is one of the best I’ve ever seen. 

- On a related note: Al Horford is a “Teammate of the Year” finalist: 

- Torrey Craig fits right in. 

- One of the biggest sign that NBA media coverage is broken is that even though a trade for Kevin Durant is virtually impossible for Boston, there are million stories out there just trying to capitalize on the headline … and it works. 

- Ja Morant has been fined $75,000 for making finger gun gestures. He just refuses to let the gun thing go. Absolute self-destructive behavior. 

- Joe Mazzulla is a national treasure

- Congratulations to JD Davison for winning G League MVP. I’ve said it before, it’s both the last thing I’d want as a player and a great accomplishment. You want to be the best at whatever level you’re playing, but I’d rather not be in the G League long enough to win the award. 

- I think letting Xavier Tillman start in Memphis was really cool. 

- Also, I’m so old that I started typing “McDaniel” instead of Tillman. Xavier McDaniel was a baaaad man out there. 

- Congratulations to Payton Pritchard on his new deal with Converse. It means his days of wearing Jaylen Brown’s sneakers are over. It would have been fun to see the dynamic of one teammate hiring the other as a paid endorser. 

- I just want to look at these two sequences again:

That's just some pretty basketball.

- Giannis Antetokounmpo had 35 points, 17 rebounds, and 20 assists last night. He’s the first player in NBA history with those numbers, and all of those 20 assists were legit. These weren’t the modern exaggerated assists where you toss it to a guy, he makes a move with three dribbles. At worse, there's one iffy one in there, but even that one isn’t as bad as some of the gifts handed out in today’s NBA. Monster night for Giannis.

- Nikola Jokic’s 61/10/10 triple-double was also awesome, but it would have been more incredible if Russell Westbrook didn’t completely botch a layup in the waning seconds of double overtime and then foul a 3-point shooter afterward to cost Denver the game. 

Westbrook is not a reliable fourth-quarter performer. Even if he has had a little bit of a resurgence in Denver, you can’t count on him late because his ego won’t let him pass up plays for better options. 

- Joel Embiid is getting surgery on his knee. This was always the smart path for the Sixers. Now he’ll go into the summer fully recovered with a plan for next season. This is his last best chance at doing something in Philly. 

He won’t actually win anything because he never has and never will, but it’s his last best chance make people think he can.

- Happy trails, Elena Delle Donne, one of the All-Time WNBA greats, who announced her retirement today. 

- This week's AI-generated image: It's the sleep part of the April schedule ... maybe Joe Mazzulla should take matters into his own hands. 

- Luke Kornet's last five games: 11.4 points, 8 rebounds, 2.4 assists, +13.2. Who else would be having the Best Week Ever?!?

- Here's my latest podcast, if you're bored.