Not really sure how definitively the Celtics earned last night’s win, but a win it certainly was. So c’mon, let’s get granular:
Brad is exceptionally right about last night’s defense.
In my recap last night, I said it seemed like the Celtics weren’t not trying on defense so much as trying and failing miserably. For the most part I stand by that, but it doesn’t change the fact of how “awful” the D was, as Brad Stevens called it.
“When we’re shorthanded like that we just have to be way better defensively,” said the Cs head coach, per The Athletic’s Jay King. “I just think you can’t leave shooters open the way we leave shooters open. The transition needs to get better. Our switching needs to be better. Communication needs to be better.”
(And turnovers, usually a Celtics strength, were another major weakness; there were 10 in the first half and 15 for the game. The Mavericks had 7.)
Some of this slippage obviously stems from the absence of Marcus Smart, whose specific return date remains unclear. But up against an offense as relentless as Dallas (even without Doncic, as they were last night), a handful of other mistakes likely would’ve made that game an L for Boston.
Enes Kanter followed one of his best games as a Celtic with one of his worst.
Despite the final result in the Philly game last week, no one could fault Kanter for effort in that contest, and there wasn’t even much to chide about his execution. This was the exact opposite.
Celtics Twitter has been…hyperbolic about their anti-Kanter feelings, no doubt. And I’ve probably amplified that a bit more than I should. But last night? Woof.
https://twitter.com/AusCelticsFan/status/1207521110410973184?s=20
don’t tell me about kanter’s offensive rebounds tonight. on his last 3 he’s had 2 blocked put-backs and a horrible miss. these are the least valuable offensive rebounds i’ve ever seen, they might as well be turnovers.
— shea (@sheanorling) December 19, 2019
If you've watched this game and still think Kanter "produces" there's nothing I can say https://t.co/gT80wQzxcD
— Chris Wozniak (@wlohaty) December 19, 2019
If I kept going the list would be damn near endless. So I won’t.
Kanter is not the worst center the Celtics have ever had or anything like that—not even the worst they’ve had in the Brad Stevens era. (Vitor Faverani STAND UP; you can obviously argue how different their roles were but I wanted to make the joke, damn it.) But in this game he was a critical point of weakness that Dallas often exploited.
Kendrick Perkins needs to color-commentate every. single. f**king. game. ever.
There was a bit of “old-ass-man-yells-at-cloud” in some of his takes, but Perkins’s personality was so damned entertaining, as the third man alongside Kyle Draper and Brian Scalabrine on the NBCS Boston broadcast, that I didn’t care.
Tony Brothers was fair, which is weird?
Not gonna lie, my first thought of any kind regarding this game was “Oh God, Tonybrother is gonna get us into some s**t, ain’t he?” I am incapable of not thinking that when he officiates the Celtics. Clearly, I am not the only one:
https://twitter.com/softcoredancing/status/1207497779402203141?s=20
Ultimately, the calls were very close, and the Cs had some obvious groaners for which they could only blame themselves (many of the frontcourt fouls; Jaylen’s three-point foul on Kleber). At final buzzer, Boston had 21 personals to Dallas’s 20.
In fairness to Tonybrother, he is just an iron-rigid rules stickler and does not engage in the showboating jackassery of Scott Foster and Joey Crawford. He, unlike them, does not actively want to be a character in the game’s narrative; he just sometimes is, and it’s happened against the Celtics quite a bit! Tonight, though, he was pretty fair when he could’ve easily not been.
Does this new Celtics era have a Big Three? Does it matter?
Going into 2017-18, we thought Boston had found a Big Three to succeed KG-Truth-Ray in Kyrie Irving, Gordon Hayward and Al Horford. Injury, the weight of expectations and acrimony undid that possibility.
Is it too early to say that the trio of Kemba Walker, Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown represent a genuine Big Three? Definitely. But the foundations are there. They are the primary scorers even when Hayward is playing (his excellence this year stems from the balance of his approach and knack for secondary playmaking). They have generally been the ones to bail the team out when other players just don’t have it.
That said—admittedly, I’ve probably said something similar before—does the whole Big Three thing matter when you have a group that possesses a fairly diverse collection of skill sets, as the Celtics do? Perhaps not. These are the sort of things that really only clarify in playoff situations. We know what an unhindered Tatum and Brown are capable of in the postseason crucible, and they clearly jell with Walker even more than they did with a seemingly content Kyrie Irving (in the 2017-18 regular season that feels light-years in the past now). It may not be one of Walker, Tatum, Brown or Hayward going all Man in the Arena that brings these Celtics to contention, but rather a unified front of excellence. Only time will tell.
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