How Celtics Can Solve Their Biggest Questions as Playoffs Approach
The Boston Celtics are the team to beat this NBA season. Their roster is as loaded as any you'll find in the Association, and their play almost always reflects that.
No team has a resume that can rival theirs. They've towered over the competition in both winning percentage (.787) and net rating (plus-11.3, per NBA.com). No other team has a win percentage above. 700 or a net rating above 7.6.
Still, this team knows as well as anyone that a strong regular season guarantees nothing come playoff time. For the Celtics to make good on their championship-or-bust potential, they need to definitively answer some of their most pressing questions.
Keeping Kristaps Porziņģis Upright
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Last June, with the Celtics less than one month removed from their Game 7 loss to the Miami Heat in the Eastern Conference Finals, they made the difficult decision to part with Marcus Smart, their longest-tenured player and emotional leader.
While they gained two first-round picks in the exchange, their biggest addition—literally and figuratively—was Kristaps Porziņģis, a longtime supplier of the unicorn blend of floor-spacing and shot-blocking. Included on his resume, though, was a lengthy injury history that included an ACL tear and a medley of maladies that have kept his game total south of 70 since his rookie season of 2015-16.
The Celtics have done what they can to limit his floor time—his 29.7 minutes are the fewest among their five starters—but he has still missed 16 of the team's first 61 games. That isn't an alarming number, but it isn't nothing, either.
Boston is fortunate to have arguably the Association's best backup big in Al Horford, but he doesn't pack the same scoring punch or offer the same paint protection as the 7'2", 240-pound Porziņģis. If the injury bug rears its ugly head and gets Porziņģis at the wrong time, the Celtics' edge over their fellow championship-chasers would significantly shrink if not evaporate entirely.
Coming Through in Crunch Time
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Statistically speaking, the Celtics have fared just fine in clutch situations, defined as the final five minutes with a scoring margin of five points or fewer. They've gone an impressive 18-9 in games that go into the clutch, and their uber-efficient plus-20 clutch net rating is fifth-best in the league, per NBA.com.
However, fans who have followed this club over the years know that the brightest lights sometimes bother this bunch. The ball doesn't always move the same, the defense can get lethargic, and the squad squanders possessions that they have to have.
In their last playoff run, Boston posted an abysmal minus-11.4 clutch net rating while dropping six of the 11 contests that featured such situations. The roster is different now, but the players who controlled the biggest possessions back then are still the ones running the show now: All-Star forwards Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown.
Neither has done much to alleviate this concern so far. Tatum is shooting just 32.6 percent on his clutch shot attempts, while Brown is converting only 25 percent of his clutch threes. And together, they've barely managed more clutch assists (18) than turnovers (13).
Maintaining Momentum
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The Celtics, who have as storied a history as any NBA team, have seldom had a season like this. Their .787 winning percentage matches their fourth-highest mark in franchise history, and their simple rating system score—a metric from Basketball Reference that accounts for strength of schedule and point differential—of 11.29 is the best they've ever posted.
None of that means anything unless they keep it up in the playoffs, though.
Boston's primary objective for this campaign isn't winning the 82-game regular-season marathon. It's solving the four-round postseason puzzle that comes after.
The Celtics clearly have the talent to finish the job, but they've had stacked rosters before. This version of the Shamrocks needs to do what no other has done since the 2007-08 squad: raise an NBA championship banner into the TD Garden rafters.
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