Yes they have that first time vet thing going on w Porzingis and Holiday too. Can the playoffs start tomorrow?
2023-24 Celtics
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One thing I like is that they haven't been digging remotely deep in the mental tank to run off this streak. They're playing deep rotations, not max effort for long stretches, and still maintaining the ability to flip the switch when needed.
Which looks a lot like.....what other great teams usually do?
Gotcha, I thought you meant "vet who comes to a winning situation for the first time."
One indication to your question - which is basically getting at the certainty with which a better team will beat a worse team - is the spread of winning percentages in the league.
In the NFL and the NBA, the top teams win at .800+ and the worst teams can win as little as .200. In MLB, a great team wins .600, very rarely as high as .650, and the inverse for bad teams. You've almost never got as much as a 25% spread between a team's winning percentages matching up. In the NHL, with ties it's harder, but I'm sure if you look at the spread of "percentage of points picked up" there, or in MLS or (even moreso) in the Premier League, it's somewhere in between that level of certainty.
I'm sure if we took the season winning percentages of each team in the league, the standard deviation of those winning percentages (i.e. the extent to which they are "spread out", except with an exact statistical calculation) for the NBA would be higher than the others. It's just a lot rarer that an inferior team beats a superior team, despite all the mechanisms for pushing parity.
I don't know the extent to which that translates to the postseason. I'm sure we could do a study looking at regular-season W% differential vs team record and see how strong the correlation is for each league. But by the time you get to the last few rounds of the playoffs, you're talking about teams with similarly great records, and it feels like it should be more of a coin flip. How you go from that to Tom Brady being 11-4 in Conference Championship Games and 7-4 in Super Bowls? Or Lebron's playoff record? I'm not sure. I guess there's outliers in every distribution.
Tatum is 11th on the MPG leaderboard, and you have to go all the way down to Jaylen Brown at 43 to find another Celtic (KP is at 48, though he's played less games). I'm knocking on every piece of wood I have and rubbing every rabbit's foot I can find because they're doing everything we can ask right now by kicking ass AND not overextending themselves.
I mentioned in the game thread, and of course all the caveats about one game/injured wings and Curry/long road trip appy, but the fundamental thing about yesterday to me wasn't hot three point shooting (that was secondary) it was that the Celtics were able to get into the paint and break down the defense almost at will. The Warriors perimeter and one on one defense simply couldn't match the Celtics. This happened early in the Finals, then Draymond dirtied things up and Payton (importantly) came back and impacted it, and things changed.
Yesterday was what every other team has to fear greatly for the playoffs: the Celtics simply have too many guys who can win off the bounce to stop them all, and the only way to stop it really is hoping they get lazy and jack up quick threes instead of attacking. The only team who has maybe the guys to stop it is the healthy version of the Clippers (who have a different problem---how do they rebound and match up with KP?) If they stick with that, they get a lot of penetration---some of which results in paint points and some of which results in ball rotation for open threes. But if they are getting into the paint, consistently, and multiple guys doing it, they are not stoppable....if the threes drop at 40% or whtaever it's a blowout, and if 30% it's tight but they can still win.
I do think teams with a ton of size (Bucks, Minnesota, to lesser degree Denver) can bother the Celtics in a different way, clogging the driving lanes some and protecting the rim better. Miami does the physical D well and can have sucess, but really needs to be able to be handsy to have a chance. The fundamental math--you need to stop two apex wings an also White and Jrue--while also having your center stick outside with KP/AL---is a major problem no one can solve so long as Celtics are disciplined in their offensive execution.
I think the NFL and NBA, winning % aside, are quite different when it comes to picking a champion. NFL can have one game flukes... a fumble, a penalty, one mistake can totally flip a single game. You would have to get unlucky 4 times in an NBA series to lose to a significant underdog... that doesn't really happen without injuries to key players.
But also, you mention teams with similar records meeting in the finals, and I just want to point out that, regarding this Celtics team, that's probably not going to happen. If the season ended today, and the best team in the west faced the best team in the east. the 48-12 Celtics would face the 42-18 Thunder. The difference between those two teams would be like if the Thunder faced the Pelicans in the Finals. It's the same difference as the 2002 Lakers vs. the Nets. The Thunder are really good, but the Celtics are on a different level, so the question is how do historically great teams - not just teams with good records - fare in the playoffs? NBA history says, if healthy, they most often win out.
This is only a side point, but it's something we've referenced a few times so I wanted to look up the data.
Celtics record by game-specific 3-point-percentage quintiles:
.318 and under: 7-5 (includes losses v DEN, @ IND #1, @ GSW, @ MIN, @ MIL, @ LAC, @ ORL*)
.319 to .358: 9-3 (includes losses v LAL, @ CHO, @ PHI)
.360 to .404: 11-1 (includes loss @ OKC, shooting .375)
.405 to .472: 12-0
Over .472: 11-1 (including loss @ IND #2, 131-133, but also including our 3 50-point wins)
Our opponents' best 3-point shooting game of the season, home vs the Lakers, they shot 19 for 36 (.528) and we lost by 9. Both games in Indy, they shot 19 for 40 (.475) and we lost by 10 and by 2. But we've won 2 of our opponents' 5 best 3-point-shooting games: Game #2 vs MIA (they shot .485, we shot .410 and we won by 8), and @ SAC (they shot .477 and it didn't matter because we shot .524, 22 for 42, and won by 25!). But of our opponents' best-20% shooting games, we have unsurprisingly only gone 7-5 in those games. So even when opponents shoot the lights out, they win less than half the time, and when they win it's only by a little.
Meanwhile, our two worst 3-point-shooting nights of the season include one win (vs PHI a few nights ago, made 5 of 22 for .227 but won by eighteen) and one bad loss (@ORL for the IST, shot 7 for 29 and lost by 17). Those were also the two lowest VOLUME 3-point games of our season. Scanning the ranked list of our games by 3-point-shooting volume, there doesn't appear to be any correlation, the losses are pretty much spaced evenly throughout the list. So we're good about taking what the opponent is giving us, and shooting it when it's the right shot. On nights when it doesn't fall, we might lose, but we can still find a way to win most of the time.
That line separating the bottom 2 quintiles, right around .360... below it we're 16-8, .667 W% (itself a record topped only by the west's top-3, OKC MIN and DEN), but above that line, we're 34-2, effectively invincible. That .360 line for us is equal to the 18th-best-3-shooting team in the league, Detroit. If we shoot as good or better than the Detroit Pistons, we basically cannot be beaten.
(n.b. the Celtics take, and make, the most 3-pointers in the league. They are 4th in 3P%, at .386, very slightly behind LAC and MIN at .389 and a bit more behind #1 OKC at .395)
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I had high expectations for this team coming into the season, but the fact that their regular season performance is keeping company with the best of the Bulls and Warriors dynasty teams is way better than I'd imagined. I was hoping for something like the big three Celtics. This sets nearly impossible expectations for the postseason but this team just doesn't seem to get rattled very often.
This is it for me. Basically, if you have a starter who can't keep Tatum or Brown in front of them and/or you don't have elite P'n'R defense/some kind of well-organized zone, you now have no chance. The Cs are relentless in identifying the mismatch, going to it, and then hammering it into the paint with either a drive for a layup or a backdown into the block. As soon as you throw a second body at the mismatch, the Cs kick it to the open man on the three-point line and either have a wide-open three immediately or have you in a desperate rotation that winds up in a weakside dunk.
Yesterday, it was mostly Curry just getting abused all over the court even with an elite helper in Draymond available. Sometimes, Tatum just won't bother moving it around because he's like, "eh, Kuminga probably isn't their worst defender but I feel like showing him what an actually good NBA wing looks like," but in the playoffs, I'm pretty confident it will just be unrelenting KP mismatches in the post, JB mismatches in the post, Tatum mismatches in the post, and then an absolute downpour of open threes from the corner and above the break by Jrue and White and Al and Pritchard and Houser, who all hit those shots at 40% or better.
Your only chance is having five guys on the floor who can deny Tatum/Brown penetration AND are strong enough to keep them out of the post AND a big who can deny KP in the post. And then on the other end you have to have a guard who's shifty enough to get their shoulders past Jrue and White and get the Cs in rotation. And if you have that guy, then Coach Joe will just put Tatum on them and White and Jrue are good enough to guard basically every power forward.
For a hyper-analytics-focused coach like Joe, it must be a dream come true having the personnel to execute basically any style of basketball he wants to deploy.
Tillman completes the dream, because now you're 9-deep with legit rotation players. If the opponent has personnel to pick on one of PP or Hauser, you play X and go 4-out with shooters around him. If they can't exploit the white boys, you can play with All the Shooting.
Yes as mentioned above historically great teams usually win out unless they are faced with other historically great teams
The two teams that I (and I'm sure everyone else) are worried about are DEN - which would be a historically great team winning back-to-back and has the probable MVP - and LAC - because they have historically great players plus the one wing who has completely taken over series before.
While it's super fun to watch the Cs dominate physically overmatched teams we're all looking forward to seeing how they play against potential contenders in somewhat meaningful games - which basically means the games against DEN, MIL, and PHO (home and away) in the next 16 days.
It's too bad that Booker will miss at least one, and probably both games. I expect this team to stomp the Suns without him.
I think the only way this C's team even loses games, barring injury, is if they have one of those 10-40 shooting nights from deep and the opponent goes 21-35 or something. That's really where we're at, and I just don't know that any opponent can do that 4 times in a 7 game series.
They're just a machine right now.
They're just a machine right now.
I didn't get to watch the game but seeing the highlights, one thing that stands out (and I can't believe I'm writing this) is Pritchard's ability to get to the basket for relatively easy points. This will be really important in the playoffs when the second unit needs to be able to hold its own to rest the starters, and getting a sneaky 4 points however you can get them can be really valuable. It just adds another dimension to the bench. He's really good at catching the defense off guard in transition or otherwise, and if he's not the one scoring he gets it to an open guy pretty efficiently.
I don't think it's that valuable in the playoffs. This isn't hockey where you do line shifts: he'll always be playing with 2-3 starters who can get to the basket, and he'll mostly be spacing the floor and opportunistically driving to pass.
It's nice when he does it, and better than not being able to do it, but it's not at all critical to what the Cs do on offense.
In case you were wondering, now that the Cs are unquestionably the #1 seed in the east, the new narrative is "being the #1 seed is bad, actually," with everyone now eager to point out that only 2008 Cs, 2013 Heat, and 2016 Cavs have made it to the finals out of the east as a #1 seed in the last 20 years.
Word. I don't ever hit the game threads anymore, but I'd imagine that occasionally people are speculating about why team X is hanging with us when we could stomp them already. Then we turn it on for about five minutes in the fourth quarter, mostly on defense, and it's clear that the underdog never really was actually in the game. And it's exactly what the great teams do. Not max effort for any length of time. Keep running deep rotations, etc. I'd say that there's maybe a handful of games this year where the team was dialed in from the tap and also keep a tight rotation playoff-style.
I've loved watching him be able to get to the rim lately, and maybe there's real growth there. Still not sold that he'll be able to do it against playoff intensity, but the threat of it (if so) would help create space for his shot. Lucky for us, we don't need it that badly. But he does seem to be a hair quicker and more decisive in finding blue sky in the last month, not just at the rim but the occasional short midranger when someone completely collapses to the rim.
If past performance is any indication, Pritchard is going to get ravenously hunted by smart teams in the playoffs and his minutes will be severely limited.
Don't get me wrong, I love him for his role and contract, I just don't think the playoffs are where he brings much value.
I actually think he's pretty decent now holding his own even in mismatches, is that a crazy take? I don't see him being successfully hunted to death in the playoffs.
here's some actually good YouTube analysis of basketball: View: https://youtu.be/Mlv4eIG9fzY?si=T9qhrcSQThURiHVt
Hollinger makes an interesting observation in his new column (which features BOS and a recap of Sloan): https://theathletic.com/5315474/2024/03/04/celtics-nba-future-three-point-shooters-sloan-analytics-conference/
i think was more true eight weeks ago than it is now as the Cs are figuring out how to attack these defenses (see, e.g., PHI) but as my Mom used to say, "We shall see".
Ironically, the teams that seem to give Boston the most trouble are the ones that make the gamble on taking away 3s; a losing bet against everyone else, it gives you a fighting chance versus the Celtics. The Pacers, for instance, beat Boston twice; Detroit gives up the second-fewest 3s and has been pasted by everyone else but took the Celtics to overtime in Boston in their only meeting this season. Denver is third on the list and won in Boston (the two teams meet again Thursday in a potential NBA Finals preview, by the way); Minnesota is sixth, and both meetings with the Celtics went to overtime.
i think was more true eight weeks ago than it is now as the Cs are figuring out how to attack these defenses (see, e.g., PHI) but as my Mom used to say, "We shall see".
Boston averages 42.4 3PA per game in their wins, and 42.2 in their losses. What really happens isn't that they take too few in their losses, they just make far fewer (31% compared to 40%). In their 12 losses they have put up 39 (MIN), 47 (PHI), 50 (CHA), 29 (ORL), 41 (IND), 58 (GSW), 40 (OKC), 35 (IND), 35 (MIL), 44 (DEN), 40 (LAC), 48 (LAL)
It's not a crazy take at all. He'll still be hunted sometimes in the playoffs, because it's the playoffs. But he seems faster and stronger this year to me. And I'm on record at being as bearish on him before this season as anyone here. He'll be a matchup-dependent guy in the playoffs, and there should just be more matchups that he fits now than a year or two ago.
FWIW, per D-DPM and DBPM he has improved materially and is a borderline neutral defender this year. Hard to unpack fully from teammates of course. Per D-LEBRON her has improved materially this year as well after trending down his first three years and is having his best defensive year by far...and is still a negative defender but can see the "neutral" line at least.
Assuming this is scoring differential (PF-PA), I'd fathom it's the 1970-71 Bucks, at +1,005 (2nd highest ever, to Lakers, 1971-72, at +1,007), next highest at just +430 with the Bulls, for an insane difference of +575. Not confirmed but like...yeah. For context, since 2007-08, only about 30 teams period have had a differential as high as +575 alone, let alone as a differential between them and the second-highest team. If curious, the Title #17 Big 3 Celts led the league that year at +841, but only (only, heh) by +235 over the Pistons (+606).
Thanks. I think one of the Warriors teams was like +11.95 to next best at like +6.2
Yea I'm in the same camp. At the beginning of the season, I didn't see a path to the playoffs for PP with DW, Jrue & the JAYs ball handling. BUT Pritchard's speed with the ball + deep 3pt shooting + ball security + offensive rebounding make him a nice curveball against opposing 2nd units. If he was easily huntable on D we would have seen it by now
How much of a factor is so many of his minutes being in the 2H of 10-50 point leads in those numbers? Those minutes don’t seem to reflect anything like those he’d be playing in a close playoff game.
No idea, but it's a factor of course. Just saying that he's less of a liability than he was.
We really need something that's in between "starter time" and "garbage time" to better assess the quality of opposition that players like PP are facing. Something like "rotation minutes" vs "deep bench minutes (garbage time)". The problem is that it's a bit of a circular definition, you can't always go by "starters vs next-5 players by minutes vs everyone-else" type stuff. Maybe break the minutes into how many opposition starters are out there: "5 starters" (usually closing lineup / crunch time) vs "2-4 starters" (more rotation-esque) vs "0-1 starters".
I bring this up because Pritchard has absolutely had his appearances against other teams' starters, or part-starter lineups when they are absolutely trying their hardest... and has also had 25-minute games where he played nearly all the second half because the bench mob needed a solid PG out there so they didn't fall apart with a 30-point lead. And we'd like to evaluate the former separately from the latter when deciding how teams would play him when there's real stakes.
Anecdotally I do think they're still going after him in a way that they're really not going after Hauser anymore. But I can't prove it without, like, lots of tape and rewatching.
If Pritchard’s 1H minutes can be separated from his 2H I think we’d have better data on this particular player due to the uniqueness of this team basically crushing everyone.
Pbpstats.com has filters for low-, medium-, high-, and very high-leverage situations and I am just seeing that you can filter it out using one player's on/off numbers (among other things). See https://www.pbpstats.com/on-off/nba/team?Season=2023-24&SeasonType=Regular+Season&TeamId=1610612738&PlayerId=1630202&Leverage=Medium,High.
The first column of the below chart is PP on numbers, the second column is PP off, and the third is the difference. This chart is only medium- and high-leverage situations since PP has very limited very high-leverage minutes as one would expect.
They are slightly better offensively with PP on the court and slightly worse defensively, with the difference being a small net negative.
By comparison, Hauser is a small net negative offensively when he's on the court (122.323 on court versus 124.979 off for a net of -2.47, all per 100 possessions) but is a big net positive defensively (108.996 on versus 113.619 off, for a net of 4.62 pts per 100 possessions) for a net positive difference.
The Hauser offense thing is almost certainly related to the first half standard substitution where Hauser comes in for Tatum with about 6 mins left in the first quarter
1st half
596 minutes, 10 minutes per game, 4 points, 1.5 rebs, 1.3 assts, 39.7% from three on 141 attempts
2nd half
631 minutes, 10.5 minutes per game, 4.2 points, 1.7 rebs, 1.5 assts, 37% from three on 127 attempts
Thanks, this is great. I particularly love the jump in OREB% from 22.7% to 30.7% when he's on the court
Seems like the extent to which the team suffers when he plays against opposing starters (medium/high leverage) is minimal, even if it's real and nonzero. That looks like what you'd expect from a non-starter playoff rotation guy, or what you'd hope to see.
That sounds right. And he has 5 starts on the season which probably helps as well.
Agreed. Similarly, the defensive increase is likely related to opponents' starters coming out of the game plus the fact that Hauser still is playing with 2 or 3 All-NBA caliber players.
Celtics social media team killing it.
View: https://twitter.com/celtics/status/1765014529451159585?t=sPigifoHlqkz8ZER-dE9hg&s=19
View: https://twitter.com/celtics/status/1765014529451159585?t=sPigifoHlqkz8ZER-dE9hg&s=19
I think it's only fully dawning on me now how much skepticism there is about the Celtics among the national media and non-Boston fans. Articles like this one from the Ringer, plus people like Ryen Russillo reporting that NBA people continually ask him if Boston is actually good, are finally making it sink in.
I just don't get it, and I think it's more than just my Boston bias. People are talking about this Celtics team like they're late-career Lob City Clippers or something, a team whose past playoff failures haunt them to the point that the core might be fundamentally broken. I see a team that, for various reasons, hasn't put it all together to win a title, but not one with catastrophic collapses. They made it to the Finals and lost to a proud Warriors team because they hadn't figured out how to win together yet. Last year's loss to the Heat was more of the same, while also revealing that they hadn't yet optimized the roster around Tatum and Brown. They have more in common with the Durant-Westbrook Thunder, a team that had early success and never put it together, but could have if the roster around them were more thoughtfully constructed.
And now, it's there. They're nine deep, they're an offensive and defensive juggernaut, and most importantly, they have one of the seven-ish guys in the league who are good enough to be the best player on a championship team. Whatever people might think of Tatum, I think that much is clear. And, having just turned 26, he's the same age that Curry and Giannis were when they won their first. If anything, it feels like Tatum and Brown are being penalized a bit for their early career success, but those teams were incomplete for lots of reasons that have nothing to do with the players those two guys are now.
I haven't been disproportionately optimistic about this team in years past, I don't think. But this year, while there's certainly causes for concern if you stare at them long enough, I have no skepticism in terms of whether they're good enough to win a title. Of course they are. That doesn't mean they'll win it, this year or ever, but there's no rational reason to not have them in that inner circle.
I just don't get it, and I think it's more than just my Boston bias. People are talking about this Celtics team like they're late-career Lob City Clippers or something, a team whose past playoff failures haunt them to the point that the core might be fundamentally broken. I see a team that, for various reasons, hasn't put it all together to win a title, but not one with catastrophic collapses. They made it to the Finals and lost to a proud Warriors team because they hadn't figured out how to win together yet. Last year's loss to the Heat was more of the same, while also revealing that they hadn't yet optimized the roster around Tatum and Brown. They have more in common with the Durant-Westbrook Thunder, a team that had early success and never put it together, but could have if the roster around them were more thoughtfully constructed.
And now, it's there. They're nine deep, they're an offensive and defensive juggernaut, and most importantly, they have one of the seven-ish guys in the league who are good enough to be the best player on a championship team. Whatever people might think of Tatum, I think that much is clear. And, having just turned 26, he's the same age that Curry and Giannis were when they won their first. If anything, it feels like Tatum and Brown are being penalized a bit for their early career success, but those teams were incomplete for lots of reasons that have nothing to do with the players those two guys are now.
I haven't been disproportionately optimistic about this team in years past, I don't think. But this year, while there's certainly causes for concern if you stare at them long enough, I have no skepticism in terms of whether they're good enough to win a title. Of course they are. That doesn't mean they'll win it, this year or ever, but there's no rational reason to not have them in that inner circle.
I agree with you about the national media — they've shifted from "too many 3s" to "haven't proved they can get it done" because it's kind of hard to argue the "too many 3s" thing when the team hasn't lost in a month.
But it's good to see all of the betting sites agreeing with what our eyes are telling us. They're down to +200/+210 to win the championship now, and -120 (!) to win the east. That's basically the same odds as the 2012 and 2014 Heat as they entered the playoffs. 2008 Celtics were +180 to start the playoffs.
So, they are a STRONG favorite at this point, still 23 games from the playoffs, and if they keep playing like this they might be favorites against the field as they start the first round.
Which is a pretty good indicator — 7 of the last 20 favorites heading into the playoffs have won the finals — but obviously not a lock. The Bucks were the favorites heading into the playoffs last year and didn't make it out of the first round (though they were +275).
Let the national media hate. I hope the players drink it up. Basketball twitterverse is garbage as a whole, and that's saying something given the hellhole that twitter has turned into.
I hate (lol who am I kidding I love it) to beat the Pointz dead horse, but the national media has gotten worse and worse about privileging Pointz over all other forms of on-court impact, including offensive.
Tatum's points and assists are similar to prime 2017-19 Steph Curry's, with a bit worse TS and much better defense. No one questioned the latter's place in the league when KD was on the team.
The Celtics, with Tatum as the engine, are scoring 7.5 more points/100 than the 2016-17 Warriors. I know the context is different, but sometimes you need perspective on how truly ridiculous that is. That wasn't very long ago.
I don't think a lot of people in the national media realize how much better BOS is today than they were last year or 2022. I mean they basically traded 2 average-to-good starters for 2 All-NBA-ish guys and as an added bonus, got to give an All-Star caliber player better usage, all for the price of two bench players.
I mean going from Smart and Horford to Jrue and KP is a super huge upgrade, while at the same time, I don't see any drop-off going from Brogdon/TL/GW to Horford / Hauser / PP.
Not to the mention the fact that JT and JB are better versions of themselves.
Talent wins (pleasestayhealthy). BOS has way more talent than they did last year.