This Celtics team is just like any number of home improvement projects I undertake. It might be less aesthetically pleasing than we expected, and it will probably take a lot longer to figure out than we originally thought.
With three games under their belt and monster leads held in all of them, there might be a temptation to feel pretty good about where they are. But the practical application of what they’ve been working on hasn’t exactly given the Celtics a true gauge of where they are. What the Celtics have participated in over the last week in a half is closer to NFL-style joint practice scrimmages than actual NBA basketball.
“We haven't played against an actual team,” Jaylen Brown admitted at the team’s Monday practice, which in and of itself might be an indication of how much work has to be done. An off day after a game is the generally accepted rule of thumb, but days off aren’t really getting this team anywhere right now.
“Some of these teams, they put pressure on us, defensively,” Brown said. “(They) made us run our offense out at half court. They turned us over a bunch of times. We may not see teams that play with that level of energy all season long. Preseason is a good ramp-up and it's good to get out there, get some cardio, get some good connectivity going. Next week we'll be able to get a real test when some of the road games."
The Celtics are, simply, a very different team this season. Three key players are on other teams and their best player is taking baby steps on his way back from a catastrophic injury. They have to adjust their style and their decision-making. They have talent, but that talent needs help to be maximized. And even if they got the most focused, full-strength Grizzlies, Raptors, and Cavs teams, they’d still be a long way from a finished product.
“I mean, you're never really where you want to be, whether you play three or 100 games,” Joe Mazzulla said. “It's just a matter of continuing to chip away at the identity you want to create. Have an understanding that no matter who you are, you always have strengths, you always have weaknesses. You're always going to have things that you have to decide, what can you turn into a strength? What's always going to be a weakness because of who you have and what you can leverage as a weakness that can become a strength.”
I think it’s fair to say that the defensive rebounding is going to fall under the “always going to be a weakness because of who you have” umbrella. They can get better at it, which is why Mazzulla spent the first half last night making his guys dizzy with substitutions in and out of the game. But will a center rotation of Neemias Queta, Luka Garza, Chris Boucher, and Xavier Tillman ever be “good?”
Mazzulla’s task, one that will test his strengths as a relationship-builder, is figuring out how to press the right buttons to mitigate the weakness so they can find other ways to overcome it. It’s not really about being a good rebounding team, per se. It’s about not being so bad that they can’t make up for it some other way.
“What gives us the best chance to win every single night? What gives us the best chance to play to our strengths?” Mazzulla said. “What self-awareness do we have to have as a team and an organization about where our deficiencies lie, and how can we navigate those together? And so it's not them adjusting to me or any of that. It's us working together on, coming up with, how can we push each other to be our absolute best, and at the same time, how could we develop an identity that gives us a shot to win every single night?”
Identities don’t develop overnight, and certainly not over three games against glorified G League teams … only one of which involved a full Celtics squad. Identities are forged in fire, with tests passed and failed. How a team handles success and failure makes them who they are.
“I'm excited about it, just figuring the puzzle out is a challenge, trying to bring the most out of yourself but the most out of your others as well,” Brown said. “It's gonna be some ups and some downs that people may not be expecting, but that's a part of it. You got new guys, new team so we got a lot of potential, but we're trying to turn that potential into like reality right now and we're working through it. It's preseason, that's what we're supposed to be doing.”
That process will stretch well into the regular season. Unlike the past couple of seasons where Mazzulla had a good amount of continuity, and a high level of talent in new players to make up for any lack of it, on which to build his team’s identity. Yes, they had to adjust for times that Kristaps Porziņģis may have been hurt or other guys were out of the lineup, but nothing materially changed. There were minor shifts when guys like Luke Kornet came into the game, but that was the extent of it.
His center rotation now could hardly be a more unique set of four individuals. Queta, Boucher, Tillman, and Garza are all completely different players. Add to that the new roles for every one of the returning starters and a patchwork bench, and the Celtics are trying to learn a lot in a short amount of time.
“The game has changed so much. It's not static rules-based basketball anymore,” Mazzulla explained. “It's reads-based and if a team plays a coverage on one possession, they're almost guaranteed to change the coverage on the next possession, and you have to be ready for that. And it's the same thing with the sub pattern, and that's the stuff that we're building an awareness to.
“Like hey, Neemie’s starting? This is how we think they're going to defend Neemie, this is the leverage points that we could have to create those two-on-ones, but in four minutes, Luka or Chris are coming in then that we don't know how they're going to match up yet, and so you have to leverage the two-on-ones and those. And so they'll never get to the point where it's like ‘we got it.’ We have to constantly be aware to the environment, how we're being defended, and how we have to do that.”
That is, quite honestly, a lot. It’s almost too much, but success in pro sports means taking on, and being able to process and execute, an unfair amount of information in a short amount of time. This is part of what comes with making all that money. The Celtics have more to figure out than they have in a long time, and the process of getting where they want to be is not an easy one.
“It makes it more difficult for us in the short term, but the idea is to make it more difficult for our opponents in the long term,” Mazzulla said. “If we can find the structure within the chaos and get that, it’ll be difficult for the environment and the opponent over the course of an entire season. And so it’s difficult on both parts. The idea is that we’re the ones that can practice it every day and we can know the unknowns before our opponent can. So if we can quickly know the unknowns and put our opposition in a situation where they can’t, then that helps. … Ideally, we have to make it simple and fast so that we can be ahead of the environment and ahead of the opponent.”
Structured chaos might be the best way to describe what’s ahead. For now, it’s much more chaos than structure. Whether they surprise people this season depends on how quickly they can find that structure.