Celtics' Biggest Surprises Through Opening 3 Weeks of 2021-22 NBA Season
It's been a choppy start to the 2021-22 NBA season for the Boston Celtics under new head coach Ime Udoka.
Eleven games into the campaign, they have already had a three-game losing streak and a stretch of three wins in four outings. The offense has occasionally erupted but often wound up stuck in the mud. The defense has been suffocating at times but problematically—and, based on the personnel, unexpectedly—leaky at others.
Speaking of surprises, the following three have played big roles during the club's start to the campaign.
Early Chemistry Concerns
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While the Celtics made some roster tweaks this offseason, their nucleus of Jayson Tatum, Jaylen Brown and Marcus Smart is entering its fifth season together.
So it was surprising to see some chemistry issues not only surface but involve those players in particular when Smart called out the All-Star wings after Boston opened November with its third consecutive defeat.
"I think everybody's scouting report is to make those guys pass the ball," Smart told reporters afterward. "They don't want to pass the ball."
The Shamrocks held a players-only meeting before their next contest, which ESPN's Adrian Wojnarowski described as "perhaps not a terribly productive meeting—maybe not even beneficial."
Shot-Makers Aren't Making Shots
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Nearly all of Boston's offseason maneuvering was made with the defensive end in mind. That's where additions Josh Richardson and Al Horford do their best work, and it's also the better end for Smart and Robert Williams III, both of whom inked extensions in August.
The activity reduced the Celtics' margin for error on offense and upped the pressure on the scoring threats to deliver.
That hasn't happened. Other than Brown, nearly all of the scorers have fallen short of expectations. Tatum's shooting rates are the worst of his career at every level. Dennis Schroder has the second sub-40 field-goal percentage of his nine-year career. Young snipers Payton Pritchard and Aaron Nesmith are both shooting below 30 percent from the field.
It's been a slog, and even if Boston braced for some offensive regression, it's hard to imagine the front office saw this coming.
Defense Has Underperformed
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It's possible the Celtics are already making this take outdated, as they have broken the clamps out of late and held three of their past four opponents below 90 points.
Still, Boston has the on-paper talent to be great at the defensive end. Instead, it ranks 10th in efficiency on that end, per NBA.com. That is decent but by no means dominant.
Prior to this stretch, the Shamrocks had allowed six of their first seven opponents to score at least 115 points. While three of those contests went to overtime, two of their opponents cleared 115 points by the end of regulation.
When those seven games were in the books—the last of which necessitated that players-only airing of grievances—Boston was buried at 27th in defense. Obviously, massive progress appears to have been made since, but the damage done then was harsh enough to keep the current numbers short of expectations.
