At their worst, the Celtics argued and blamed each other for their shortcomings. At their best, they came together to iron out those same weaknesses. 'It was just a part of their game that we all had to develop.'
, helped spur the changes but the shift started at the top of the roster with Tatum and Brown yearning to become more well-rounded. Their biggest skeptics wondered if the Celtics should break up the young duo but missed out on the most important factor. They always wanted to lift up their teammates. Brown and Tatum just needed to learn how.
“I felt like it was a breaking point,” said Tatum. “It was either going to make or break the season. And we got closer instead of separating.”The Celtics’ offense now relies heavily on what Mazzulla calls “randomness.” As Smart described the system, the team has “a couple plays” with all sorts of reads off those actions. Everything only works if the players operate on the same page.The foundation began to take place last season.
The group went over reads. There was a focus on detail after detail. The group highlighted all of the factors Tatum and Brown needed to consider on each possession: Who was guarding each of them? How were they being defended? Who else was on the court with them? By working in unison, how could they take advantage of their opponent’s strategy and their own personnel?
“So once you’re able to get to that, it’s like, ‘Here’s what’s really going on.’ It’s not that you’re not passing or you’re being selfish. It’s not any of those. It’s we don’t necessarily have the system set up to where we’re able to take advantage of defenses together. And when you have really talented people working together, yeah it’s going to be difficult and yeah you’re going to have to figure that part out.
One difference now? The Celtics have turned the lessons of last season into an even more fluid offensive system.“We’ve been playing freely,” Smart said late in the regular season. “We don’t have any chains on. That’s not saying that last year we did, it’s just even more evident this year to let us just play. And that’s the thing that Joe has been preaching. He wants us to play. He just wants to be here when we need him. And we love Joe for that.
Mazzulla said he sometimes installed actions the day before a game. When he did, he said Tatum and Brown “executed the reads the next day in the game to a T.” Maybe so, but Boston’s offense stalled out in key moments throughout that series. The Celtics led by five points with 7:32 remaining in a Game 4 loss but scored just six points the rest of the way. Afterward, Tatum blamed the drought on stagnation. His recognition of the problem failed to stop it later in the series. Boston trailed by just one point entering the fourth quarter of Game 5 before scoring just five points over the first eight minutes of the period.
don’t even know what they’re running so how do we know?’ And it just makes it a little harder to scout when you can just go out there and say we’re just going to pass the ball, screen and cut and not run any plays.”
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