Boston Celtics focused on youth to drive team cohesion
Thursday 24 October 2019 10:29, UK
Sky Sports NBA's Mark Deeks examined the Boston Celtics' season-opening game and discovered a team that appears to be looking to youth to improve their cohesion.
It would be ridiculous to assign too much meaning to a one-game sample size. Still, a combination of each team's regular-season opener and five pre-season games immediately prior to them at least gives us on the outside some idea of how NBA coaches, at least in the early stages of the season, intend to stagger their line-ups.
It is therefore of note that, in their first game of the season last night against the Philadelphia 76ers, the Boston Celtics played seven players off the bench in the first half. Behind their starting line-up of Kemba Walker, Jaylen Brown, Jayson Tatum, Gordon Hayward and Enes Kanter, they gave first-half minutes to each of Carsen Edwards, Grant Williams, Robert Williams, Semi Ojeleye, Marcus Smart, Brad Wanamaker and Daniel Theis.
Respectively, those players averaged 18.1, 18.5, 8.3, 17.4, 19.2, 17.7 and 12.5 minutes per game in the pre-season. Edwards, impressively, even led the team in scoring in that time. It would appear, then, as though the Celtics are going for a 12-man rotation in the early going. And it would also appear as though they are unfazed by how young the bench half of that rotation will be.
Despite the relative youth of Brown and Tatum, the Celtics' starting line-up features five of their six most veteran players, with Smart being the sixth. Only those three, Hayward and Ojeleye return from last year's postseason rotation. Of the seven reserves to feature in the first half of last night's game, there were two rookies, two sophomores and two third-year players, with only Smart having more years of experience than that.
And the five players on the roster who did not feature in the game at all - Romeo Langford, Tremont Waters, Tacko Fall, Javonte Green and Vincent Poirier - are all NBA rookies as well.
The Celtics finished last season with a playing roster that, although ranking only as the 17th oldest in the NBA, featured a rotation heavy in veterans, and long with continuity. In our pre-season look at the Denver Nuggets, we explored the value of continuity as a general principle in an era of high roster turnover, and found some benefits, but note that the Nuggets' situation is different is different to Boston's. Their young core needs time to grow together.
The Celtics of last year, by contrast, did not have as young of a young core, simply did not fit together, and certainly did not grow together.
In addition to the returning Smart/Brown/Tatum/Ojeleye/Hayward five, the Celtics' rotation last year also included Kyrie Irving, Terry Rozier, Al Horford, Aron Baynes and Marcus Morris. It seems unlikely that anyone can implicate the defensive-minded Baynes in the team's lack of offensive chemistry, and Horford has similarly mostly escaped the criticism given his versatility and relatively low-usage offensive role.
The other three, however, are all shot-happy players. And as well as being shot-happy players, they were NBA veterans headed to free agency looking to get paid. All of them did.
Irving signed with the Brooklyn Nets on a four-year, $136,490,600 contract, while Rozier was signed-and-traded to the Charlotte Hornets in exchange for Walker to a three-year, $56.7m contract of his own. Meanwhile, after a false start with the San Antonio Spurs, Morris eventually signed a one-year, $15m deal with the New York Knicks. The cost of getting all that money, though, was an offensive aggressiveness that disrupted the on-court flow of the team, and, as we now know, the off-court chemistry as well.
The old adage pejoratively states that there is only one ball, and it is meant to be a warning shot across the bow to any team too overly loaded up on scorers. Perhaps without meaning to, this is what the Celtics did.
Seemingly feeling empowered by a strong 2017/18 postseason run in the absence of Irving due to injury - one in which he averaged as-near-as-is 20 points, five rebounds and five assists per game as the starting lead guard - Rozier spent all of last season playing as a pastiche of himself, looking to score at every opportunity and forcing offense despite not being a consistent finisher from any area of the court.
Morris has also become increasingly aggressive offensively over his career, and while his knack for freelancing and dropping contested jump shots from both mid- and long-ranges did help to save some stagnant possessions, it also wasted many other ones.
Furthermore, although Irving has always been one of the NBA's best scoring talents who, in the early part of last season at least, looked to have an improved understanding as to when to attack and when to react, he did not steady the ship or, it seems, quell the rebellion.
The Celtics were supposed to be revered for their depth, but all that depth ultimately led to redundancy, and a lack of sufficient minutes and scoring opportunities to keep everybody happy. Clearly not all buying into the team's greater good, the Celtics did not cohere and limped to the barn, never truly threatening the title it looked on paper as though they could win.
When a team is full of youngsters, however, the established hierarchy has fewer challengers. Carsen Edwards, for example, is an excellent scoring prospect, as evidenced by the pre-season barrage he put up on some extremely efficient outside shooting. Tiny but tough, he has moves, speed and relentless confidence, looking so far like the Allen Iverson of second-round picks.
And yes, as stated above, sample sizes this small are largely meaningless. But by year's end, let's see if Edwards is not an important bench scorer.
Edwards is however still very young. He will have come up through his basketball education looking up to an NBA star like Walker, hoping to be him, hoping to even be around him, let alone backing him up on one of the oldest and most storied franchises in the world's top league. What level of gumption would it take for him to be challenging his place in the scheme of things when he is so new to all this?
Young players are hungry, certainly. But they are hungry for minutes and job security, especially since, of all the Celtics' rookies, sophomores and third-year players, only Edwards has any guaranteed money beyond 2021. Rozier excepted, players on their first contracts are generally fighting to get a second at all, let alone worried about piling in numbers in order to increase the size of it.
They are thus constantly playing for their careers, and obtaining job security means both doing what it takes to win, and being known for doing so. And normally, that means shot selection that errs on the side of caution and good defensive commitment. Veteran players should be looking to do what it takes to win too, of course, but the 'Disease of More', particularly in this era when huge money is being moved around, becomes too palpable to ignore.
The Celtics, in a way, found that all the injuries they suffered in 2017/18 actually hurt them more in 2018/19. The absence of Gordon Hayward for all but a few minutes of the first game of the season gave plenty of on-court opportunities to Brown and Tatum, who impressed, and also to Morris, who showed his value.
When Hayward returned, though, the others did not want to yield. And Hayward, having not come back with the same explosion he once had, did not force them to either. Similarly, Irving's late injury as above gave Rozier the opportunity to be a postseason breakout player. And after a player has put in that much production on so big of a stage, it is hard to ask them to go back to being a reserve playing less than half the game.
It is not then a coincidence that the only veteran of note coming off the bench, Smart, is the one who plays the best defense and who made the most concerted efforts to improve.
It should be noted that although parts of this Celtics roster lack for NBA experience, multiple players have had fairly long European runs. In what has become a team tradition over the last three years, Poirier, Wanamaker and Theis have been signed straight out of the EuroLeague, as was Shane Larkin at one point, and Green joins the team from playing in the EuroCup.
With Poirier and Theis also having plenty of national team experience for France and Germany respectively, their lack of NBA experience should not be confused for being a lack of top-level experience.
Nonetheless, it seems as though this does not challenge the hierarchy in the same way. Proving oneself in the NBA and proving oneself in Europe, even at Europe's highest level, are two different things. And with neither Wanamaker or Theis having had the excellent postseason run that Rozier had in 2017, they have instead embraced their roles; Wanamaker as a composed stable back-up combo guard, Theis as a rebounder and finisher.
That is to say, like Smart, doing the 'other' things.
The water was poisoned in Boston last year by too many cooks spoiling the broth. But young players have to earn their bones to stick in this league and are thus pliable.
While the Celtics will still have to resolve offensive balance among their starting five, with particular reference to Jayson Tatum's increasingly questionable shot selection, they have deliberately compiled a young bench that will not likely challenge the starters for shots.
Once bitten, twice shy.
