The Celtics have been one of the NBA’s biggest overachievers so far this season
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The Boston Celtics have won 10 of their last 12 games with six of the seven most recent victims being the Magic, Pistons, Cavaliers, Knicks, Lakers (albeit without Luka Dončić and LeBron James), and Raptors, whom Boston defeated on Sunday, 121-113, to extend its longest winning streak of the season to five.
Without going back through everyone’s schedule, that may be the best stretch of wins for any team this season. Those six teams listed have a combined record of 94-49, and the Celtics dispatched of them by almost 10 points per game on average. The Celtics weren’t supposed to be this good. But here they are at 15-9 — 15-6 since an 0-3 start — with the league’s fifth-best net rating and No. 2 offense.
How are they doing this without Jayson Tatum, one of the best offensive players in the world, and no center to stretch the floor with both Kristaps Porziņģis and Al Horford (along with Jrue Holiday and Luke Kornet for good measure) gone? It’s not easy, that’s for sure.
On paper, with the notable exception of their clip-emptying 3-point volume, so much about how the Celtics score looks late-90s difficult. Mid-range jumpers for days. Nothing at the rim. They are top five in isolation frequency. The C’s are bottom five in assists and assist points. If you subscribe to the make-or-miss theory, then this is pretty simple: The Celtics are making not just a ton of shots, but a ton of traditionally tough shots.
| Shot Type | FGM (per game) | League Rank |
|---|---|---|
| Pull-up jumpers | 12.8 | No. 1 |
| Mid-range jumpers | 12.9 | No. 2 |
The Celtics have to make a lot of jumpers because they rank bottom five in paint points. Just 23% of their shots come at the rim (inside four feet), per Cleaning the Glass, the lowest frequency in the league.
Add to that a league-high 7.4 shots per game from the 15-19 foot range, otherwise known as the NBA dead zone, and the Celtics have the league’s second-worst expected field goal percentage based on the location of their shots, per CTG.
But none of that matters when the shots, no matter how they look on paper, are going in — which, more and more, they are for the Celtics. They are connecting on 50.3% of their overall shots and 41.2% of their 3s over the past three weeks, which registers as the fourth- and third-best marks in the league, respectively, over that span.
It starts with the 3s
The Celtics have been a high-volume 3-point offense dating back to the end of the Brad Stevens era and the Ime Udoka season, but Joe Mazzulla has taken this to another level.
Under Mazzulla, the Celtics have largely turned their games into 3-point contests. This year that strategy has been even more pronounced. The Celtics are taking 43.8 3s per game (technically No. 3 league wide but effectively the same amount as the No. 1 Cavaliers who are taking 44) and making a league-high 16.
Meanwhile, 40.2% of the non-garbage/heave shots that Boston opponents take are 3-pointers, the sixth-highest mark in the league. This is to say, the Celtics — who only allow 27.6% of their opponents’ shots to come at the rim, the second-lowest frequency in the league, in addition to allowing just 41.7 points in the paint, also the second-lowest mark in the league — want you to take 3-pointers because they believe they will outshoot you.
They’re generally right. When the Celtics make at least 36% of their 3s — basically the league average — in a given game, they are 11-0 this year. And this is only going to happen more often as Derrick White, Payton Pritchard and Sam Hauser (all having down 3-point seasons overall) regress to their means. That is already happening for White, who’s made 41% of his 3s over his last seven games, and for Hauser, who’s at 42.5% in that same stretch.
The Celtics make all varieties of 3-pointers. Their jump-shot diet is a near 50-50 split of catch-and-shoots and off-the-dribble (only the Lakers attempt more, as a percentage, of the latter). The Celtics, meanwhile, lead the league with 9.8 screen assists per game, and it leads to a lot of this. https://streamable.com/e/7ff096?
As for the catch and shoots, it’s a lot of bait and kick. Notice that I didn’t say “drive and kick” because the Celtics, as a whole, do not drive — which is defined as “any touch that starts at least 20 feet from the hoop and is dribbled within 10 feet of the hoop excluding fast breaks” — that much (43.2 times a game, the sixth-lowest mark in the league according to NBA tracking data).
What they do is threaten to drive it. If the paint is a body of water, they are always dribbling right up to the shoreline, maybe dipping their toe in, toying with wing defenders time and again until they finally take the bait and help down even just a few steps. Then boom, they kick to the shooter that was left and fire away. https://streamable.com/e/32tc8q?
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