BOSTON — One locker room theme emerged after the Boston Celtics handled the New York Knicks on Friday night. The Celtics want to empower each other. At the very least, Joe Mazzulla and his players seemed, um, empowered to say the word empowered.
Mazzulla started the trend while praising the performances of Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown. The All-Stars only scored 42 combined points during the 133-123 win, far from a huge night by their standards, but Mazzulla said their impact extended beyond buckets. He thought they — you guessed it — empowered their teammates.
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“For Jaylen and Jayson, there was a point where Jayson didn’t score in the first quarter and Jaylen had taken like three shots, and you couldn’t tell because they were doing other stuff,” Mazzulla said. “Those guys are defined by one thing, but in reality, that to me is success because they allowed their teammates, and their teammates took the pressure off of them and they facilitated.
“That is what it’s going to take for us to be great, is the balance. There’s going to be nights where they’re going to have to be amazing, and there’s going to be nights where we got to play like we did tonight. The more we can be connected and trustworthy on that, it’s super important. But I thought that was great by both of them to be facilitators, and it shows because they empowered the rest of the guys. We’re all connected.”
10-0 on the parquet ☘️ pic.twitter.com/AKf9M9TDuz
— Boston Celtics (@celtics) December 9, 2023
Brown spent most of his press conference addressing an ejection he deemed unfair, but also touched on the importance of helping his teammates flourish. Against the Knicks, he said he wanted to help get Kristaps Porziņģis involved early during his first game back from a calf injury. Though Brown only finished with four assists against New York, he led the Celtics with 10 potential assists, a better measurement of his passing in the game. Tatum landed right behind him with nine potential assists.
“I think it’s one of the themes for us as a team,” Brown said. “Other organizations do a good job empowering (their) guys and we got to continue to do that too. Empowering Payton (Pritchard), empowering Derrick (White). Empowering guys, Jrue (Holiday), everybody else around, Luke (Kornet), to play at a high level and that takes just instilling confidence and trust. It takes chemistry that needs to be built. But that’s definitely been an emphasis of mine as the season starts because the goal is obviously to win as many games as possible, but to be ready to win when the playoffs start.”
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Brown wasn’t the only Celtics player to note a desire to empower Holiday. During his first season in Boston, Holiday has not scored 20 points yet in a single game. In fact, his season high of 18 points is lower than the 19.3 points per game he averaged while making the All-Star team for Milwaukee last season. Holiday doesn’t seem to care about his shrunken usage rate. He can impact a game in a long list of other ways, but Mazzulla said it was “great to see Jrue aggressive” after the guard scored 16 points on 7-for-11 shooting against the Knicks. White, like Brown, suggested the Celtics need to do more to help Holiday.
“It’s not easy to come to a team where it’s kind of established with people that have been here a couple years,” White said. “And he’s a great player and he’s done so many great things in this league so we just have to do a better job of empowering him more to do what he does. And we’ve got a long way to go and we’re going to need him this whole year. So he had a great game today. Even when he doesn’t have great numbers, he still has good games and impacts winning a lot. So any time we can, just to empower him and help him out any way we can, that’s what we need to do.”
Something tells me the Celtics are taking the concept of empowerment seriously.
Turnover issue on defense?
After a recent practice, Mazzulla didn’t need to wait for the end of a question about one of his preseason goals. He interjected as soon as he heard the topic of conversation: his desire for the Celtics to force more turnovers this season.
“How’s that going?” Mazzulla asked.
He knew the answer to his question, of course: not well. Despite having the best record in the Eastern Conference and the third-best defense in the NBA, the Celtics ranked 28th in opponent turnover rate as of Sunday evening. An inability to create mistakes has become one of Boston’s most glaring statistical red flags. It was one of their issues last season, too, which is why Mazzulla targeted the area for improvement over the offseason. He stressed that forcing turnovers would be one key to Boston’s chances of survival on cold shooting nights. But, well, the Celtics have gotten worse at forcing turnovers. They have fallen two spots from their 26th-place finish last season.
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“It’s a tough one,” Mazzulla said. “It’s something that you really, really have to commit to consistently. It’s a matter of like, what’s the DNA of our defensive identity versus what can we realistically be really good at over a long period of time, and so it’s still something that we’re working to do is some of our defensive adjustments. Obviously you can always get better at the little things. Your ball pressure, your active hands, trying to get deflections, but we’ve cleaned up a lot of other areas that we haven’t been great at over the years like our offensive rebounding, our crashing and stuff, and so really deciding is it the true DNA of our team or is it more about can we get better at having some different adjustments that we can go to and be good at those?”
Despite a roster loaded with high-level defenders, the Celtics have forced fewer than 10 turnovers in 10 of their 21 games. It’s one reason why they rank 19th in points added through transition per 100 possessions and 22nd in transition frequency, according to Cleaning the Glass. Mazzulla may not abandon hopes of forcing more turnovers in the future, but sounded ready to accept that won’t be one of his team’s strengths this season.
“I look at that and I say like what’s the more DNA of our team?” Mazzulla said. “What can we realistically get better at and coach because you can’t even control forcing turnovers. You almost have to sell out to that, so to speak, or have certain types of guys where for us we can get better at our decision-making, our offensive execution which keeps our turnovers down. We’ve really grown in our crashing and our offensive rebounding, so we’ve found a couple other areas to help control the shot margin and so I think it’s focused around what makes sense and what puts our team in the best position to be successful.”
(Photo of coach Joe Mazzulla and Jrue Holiday: Maddie Meyer / Getty Images)
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