Ranking Celtics' Biggest Weaknesses Through 2 Months

The Boston Celtics should be better than this.

Two months into the 2021-22 NBA season, they've managed to draw dead even: 14 wins, 14 losses. The ceiling should be higher; so should the floor.

They roster a pair of in-prime—or, more likely, still ascending—All-Stars in Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown. They have a ferocious defensive trio in Marcus Smart, Al Horford and Robert Williams III. They scored one of the summer's biggest bargains when Dennis Schroder landed in their lap. The roster isn't short on young prospects with ample room to grow.

And yet, nothing has changed their fate. Not even the front office and coaching staff restructuring. The Shamrocks were .500 last season, and they're right back at the same spot.

Why can't this club get over the hump? The following three issues—ranked by significance—are the primary culprits.

3. Jayson Tatum's Inefficiency

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If you wanted to argue that Jayson Tatum's uncharacteristic shooting woes belong in the No. 1 spot, you could. Boston's season will never be what it could be if its All-Star swingman isn't himself.

But that's the thing—this is so outside the norm for Tatum that it has to iron out over time, doesn't it?

Granted the shooting woes (career-worst connection rates from all three levels) have already lingered long enough to make you think this could be a thorn in the Shamrocks' side all season. He has never had a higher average shot distance (15.2 feet, per Basketball-Reference) and only once had a smaller percentage of his shots come inside of three feet (21.6), so maybe he's a victim of his own shot selection.

His plummeting percentages can't get swept under the rug, because he is too valuable to this offense for that to happen. Having said that, though, there are four years of data saying he's a more efficient scorer than he has been the past two months. That doesn't forgive all of the misses, but he does deserve some benefit of the doubt that he'll figure it out at some point.

2. Shooting Woes

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The Celtics are not a good shooting team.

Entering Tuesday, they ranked 23rd in field-goal shooting (44.4 percent) and 21st in three-point percentage (33.7). Among their top six players in minutes per game, only Jaylen Brown is hitting more than 34 percent of his threes. For context, the league-average mark is 34.8.

Some positive regression should be coming. As mentioned, Tatum has proved to be a better shooter than he's been this season, and the same goes for Al Horford (29.5 percent, down from his career rate of 36.0) and Marcus Smart (27.3, 31.7). Aaron Nesmith and Payton Pritchard both shot 37-plus percent from range as rookies; neither is above 32 percent at the moment.

Still, there aren't many snipers in this rotation, especially if Nesmith and Pritchard aren't nightly regulars anymore. Williams is a non-shooter, and that has always been a tricky area for Smart. That's 40 percent of the starting five, so if even one of Tatum or Horford stays trapped in their current funk, those are serious spacing problems within that group.

1. Stagnant Offense

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The Celtics' whole appears less than the sum of its parts. It was the same problem that plagued them last year.

There are a lot of individual talents on this team, but they don't always come together and elevate one another. Too often, the offense bogs down into one isolation after the next—only the Brooklyn Nets, a team powered by two generationally great one-on-one scorers in Kevin Durant and James Harden, isolate more frequently than the Celtics, per NBA.com.

They need more passing out of Tatum and Brown—the message Smart tried to publicly send them in early November—but this is bigger than Boston's wings. The Celtics need a better facilitator who can provide scoring chances for himself and his teammates. At the same time, they need to consistently commit to moving without the basketball so this 21st-ranked attack doesn't get bogged down so often.

High-level shot-creators, of course, don't come cheap, so the high degree of difficulty in solving this issue in-season is the reason it ranks No. 1. If there isn't an internal fix—no obvious one comes to mind, beyond simply executing better—then this flaw could prove fatal.