Boston Celtics coach Joe Mazzulla isn't putting his scouting reports where everybody can see them anymore, but he's been pretty transparent about how he wants the team to improve this season. In Mazzulla's view, Boston was not flexible enough last year.
That is one way to explain why the Celtics, who finished second in both offense and defense in the 2022-23 regular season and had the league's best point differential, were surprisingly shaky in the playoffs. After falling down 3-0 in the conference finals against the eighth-seeded Miami Heat, then getting blown out in Game 7 at home, the front office responded by trading for Kristaps Porzingis and Jrue Holiday. And, to hear Mazzulla tell it, the coaching staff responded by opening their minds, maaaaan.
"Probably the thing that I learned the most last year was: Even though you have a really, really, good fastball, you need one or two other things," Mazzulla told reporters during training camp.
What 'other things' will they have in their arsenal?
On the first possession of the preseason, the 7-foot-3 Porzingis swished a catch-and-shoot 3, providing a preview of the effect he'll have on the Celtics' offense. Throughout this era, they've been able to play 5-out and toggle between one-big and two-big lineups, but they no longer have to sacrifice spacing or skill for size.
Simply having a big who shoots this quickly and accurately will give Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown more room to operate. Porzingis is much more than a floor spacer, though. He can catch lobs, act as a high-post hub, and, crucially, score one-on-one when games get grimy.
"When you look at the game in the fourth quarter, when you look at the game in the playoffs, it's essentially the same thing," Mazzulla told NBC Sports Boston at media day. "We've had great players, we've had great stuff here, but we haven't had the ability to change the dynamic of offense late in games, whether it's with post-ups, whether it's with nail ISOs on mismatches."
Porzingis, Mazzulla said -- both to NBC Sports Boston and to JJ Redick on "The Old Man and the Three" -- represents a "curveball." When Boston is having trouble finding its flow offensively, it can simply get him the ball around the free throw line and let him go to work.
Like former MVP Dirk Nowitzki and current MVP Joel Embiid, Porzingis is dangerous at the nail because it's difficult for opponents to double-team him there. He can shoot over fellow bigs, so non-bigs have trouble affecting his shot without fouling. And while Porzingis doesn't have the reputation of a dominant post player -- blame his slight build, his lack of Hakeem-esque footwork and a 2019 Rick Carlisle press conference -- his touch and high release point made him one of the league's best scorers in the post last season.
This gives the Celtics a counter to switch-everything defenses. It also gives their opponents, who will usually only have one big on the floor, a decision to make whenever Porzingis shares the court with Al Horford. Last season, Porzingis saw plenty of mismatches when paired with Daniel Gafford.
Mazzulla loves 3-pointers and likes math, but he told Redick that Boston will sometimes need to "make really hard shots" -- i.e. tough 2s -- in the playoffs. This is part of what feeding Porzingis is about, but it's also about finding more ways to get two defenders on the ball, so they can create easy ones. Ideally, the Celtics will "get Jayson and Jaylen open, catch-and-shoot 3s because Kristaps is posting a smaller guy" late in close games, Mazzulla told NBC Sports Boston.
So it's all about Porzingis?
It's all about options, in terms of who's playing, what plays they're running and how they might solve postseason problems. Now that Holiday is in the picture, the Celtics effectively have six starters, giving Mazzulla the ability to mix and match with his closing (and perhaps starting) lineups depending on what the situation demands.
Holiday's usage rate (24.4% last season) will likely fall now that he's playing with Tatum, Brown, Porzingis and Derrick White, but he'll also make plays for all of those guys. He has a post game and a midrange game, and, in this context, that stuff should be more efficient than ever before. Opposing teams have to put their best perimeter defenders on the Jays, and, especially when White and Payton Pritchard are on the bench, Holiday will have chances to punish smaller, weaker players. He is fond of doing that.
'The addition of Porzingis and Jrue and all the guys that we have and our spacing will allow us to go to those post-ups, try to get to the free throw line," Mazzulla told reporters. "But at the end of the day, if you look at our roster, there's [opportunities to get two defenders on the ball] all over the floor. We have to take the best possible shot, and if that is a 3, that's great. When it doesn't go in, we have to crash."
Together, Porzingis and Holiday will make Boston less predictable. Porzingis is enormous but can shoot from beyond 30 feet and drive closeouts like a wing. Holiday is a guard who plays bully ball, and I bet he'll be used as a screener in this offense. Tatum and Brown will remain the stars of the show, but, on any given possession, the opposing defense will have more to worry about, be it Holiday crashing the offensive glass, Porzingis cutting to the rim or Horford screening one of them open. Early in the third quarter on Tuesday, they made the New York Knicks scramble all over the place to keep up with their beautiful ball movement ...
... and, the next time down the floor, Holiday simply wormed his way through New York's defense for an and-1:
So it's all about offense?
Just as the Celtics want to be equally comfortable running pretty sets and hunting favorable matchups, they want to be equally comfortable with multiple defensive coverages. Switching has served them well for years, but they have new personnel and a new philosophy.
"You have to be able to go to something different during the game that change the momentum," Mazzulla told Redick. "And it's really, really hard to just switch, switch, switch all the time. It puts a ton of pressure on your team."
Porzingis is most comfortable in drop coverage, but he "has to be able to come here and play defense in different layers and do different things," Mazzulla told reporters. Sometimes, he'll have to come up to the level of the screen and drop back. Sometimes, perhaps in late-clock situations, he'll have to switch or blitz. Zone defense is one way to keep a rim protector close to the basket, and it's also the easiest way to change the rhythm of a game. Mazzulla said that one of the reasons Boston's coaching staff experimented with zone at summer league in Las Vegas was to figure out how to teach it.
The Celtics have been drilling a full-court press, too, and they used it repeatedly in the second quarter against New York. It looked menacing with Holiday and White on the front line:
Mazzulla told Redick (and reporters at media day) that he didn't talk to the team about defense enough last season because he thought its importance was obvious, but he plans to emphasize it more going forward. He was correct throughout 2022-23, though, when he repeatedly stressed that offense and defense are connected. The Celtics' turnovers early in the conference finals doomed them, but they might not have committed so many if they had been able to get more stops and attack before the defense was set. (Chicken-and-egg conundrum: They might have been able to get more stops if they had committed fewer turnovers. One virtue of old-school iso ball is that it tends to limit opponents' fast breaks.)
This season, Mazzulla wants to force more turnovers, per his conversation with Redick. Given that Boston ranked 26th in opponent turnover percentage last season, it is an achievable goal, particularly if the staff empowers Holiday to be as aggressive as he'd like, knowing that Porzingis is behind him. This is a change in the Celtics' defensive approach, but it's also a way to diversify their offense, just like the newcomers' post-ups and isolations. The point is to rely less on Tatum and Brown making magic happen in the halfcourt, which should eventually make it easier for them to do so.
It all goes back to Mazzulla's favorite word: flexibility. If this is the year Boston fulfills its championship potential, it'll be because the team has prepared itself to win in different ways.
