BOSTON — If basketball were a two-quarter sport, this would be a very different article. But it’s not, and the Boston Celtics should be glad they got a halftime reset on Friday night.
They mounted a 22-point comeback over the Miami Heat, highlighted by a 36-15 third-quarter splash. Nikola Vucevic made his Celtics debut, Payton Pritchard dominated, and Derrick White’s defense was unbelievable.
It was an all-around incredible performance from Boston in front of the best TD Garden crowd of the season. So, what went into the success?
1. The Payton Pritchard-Nikola Vucevic connection
Vucevic is a walking, talking mismatch. And in the third quarter, his connection with Pritchard completely broke the Heat’s defense.
Look at this play. Vucevic screens for Pritchard in the corner, and the Heat don’t switch. As a result, Dru Smith is behind the play. Pritchard gets a step on him, Kel’el Ware helps over late, and he draws an and-one.
It may not seem like much, but Miami refused to switch because Vucevic was bullying mismatches in the post for the entire third quarter.
Had the Heat decided to switch, as they were for most of the third, it would have looked something like this.
Vucevic gets the switch, bullies Smith down into the restricted area, and tips in his own initial miss.
It was Vucevic’s first game. He and Pritchard (and the rest of Boston’s ball-handlers) still have work to do. But the Celtics know how valuable Vucevic’s mismatch hunting can be.
Pritchard is confident that their pick-and-roll chemistry will only improve from here on out.
“We’re gonna get better at it,” Pritchard told BostonSportsJournal.com. “Like you said, it’s very new still. But he’s a mismatch problem when you switch, so we got to utilize him, and we’ll get better and better at it.”
And Boston’s new big man is confident, too,
“Obviously, all three of them [Pritchard, White, and Jaylen Brown] are high-level players,” Vucevic said. “Very smart. High IQ. And I think myself, as well. And I think we’ll get a pretty good feel for it pretty [quickly]. Figure it out, the roll, pop, short roll, different situations. Tonight, they switched a lot, so a lot of it was just switching me, kind of roll to see.
“We didn’t get as much in the pick-and-pops or pick-and-rolls, and things like that. So, depending on the teams we play. But I think I get up to speed pretty well with them. When you have high-caliber players like they are, usually it will make my life much easier.”
2. Pritchard’s bucket-getting
That aforementioned and-one was reinforced by a moment with TD Garden.
When Pritchard drew the foul, and the ball dropped through the basket, the crowd went nuts. He walked over to the corner of the court and screamed. What was once a 22-point Heat lead (21 at the half) was down to seven.
All the momentum was on Boston’s side.
“Just being a competitor,” Pritchard said of the moment. “Obviously, being down 20, I was showing fight. You just ain’t going away. So, that’s really what it was, and obviously, I knew the crowd would get into it.”
Bucket after bucket, Pritchard willed the Celtics back into the game. His third-quarter masterpiece had it all.
Deep-range, late-shot-clock threes. The and-one bucket on Ware. And even a high-arcing fadeaway middy over Nikola Jovic.
And that just accounts for one side of the ball.
As Pritchard was carrying the scoring load for the Celtics, he was also checking Miami’s best offensive option: Norman Powell.
He met him at half-court, bodied him, and even poked the ball away at one point. Pritchard made it his goal to keep Powell out of the equation.
“I mean, he was just going. He got going,” Pritchard said. “And I knew, certain possessions, I just wanted to stick him. He’s a tough player, so I wanted it.”
Powell only made two shots in the third quarter, and they both came in the final two minutes. He didn’t score on Pritchard a single time.
Meanwhile, Pritchard ended the third with nine points on 3-of-4 shooting (2-of-2 from deep).
3. Derrick White’s defense
Obviously, White’s game-winning shot with 1:31 left in the fourth will get all the attention. As will his big-time third-quarter threes that elevated Boston’s comeback. But his defense was the real show-stopper on Friday night.
Lost amidst the chaos of an ugly first half, White’s defensive impact was a shining light at the end of a dark, dark tunnel.
Miami doesn’t use a traditional offensive style. So, White’s defensive mindset shifted.
“I think their offense is a little bit different [from] all the teams in the NBA,” White said. “So, just trying to know who you’re shifted off of, try to exit slow, show that crowd, and I haven’t got a block in a while, so lots of people were mentioning that, so I had to get a couple today.”
White did, in fact, ‘get a couple.’ He actually got more than a couple. Double a couple.
His four blocks were wildly impressive.
He blocked Andrew Wiggins on a cut, Ware in the post (straight up), Smith on a paint shot attempt, and Davion Mitchell on a drive.
The block on Ware may have been the most impressive from an individual defensive standpoint, but the one on Smith was a perfect representation of how elite White is when helping off the ball.
He was already in the area, so he had an advantage, but as soon as White saw Smith try to draw a foul on Sam Hauser, he pounced.
White knows that Miami’s offensive style is predicated on one-on-one advantage creation. So, guys are going to try to take advantage of their matchups. That altered his timing and decision-making.
“They don’t do any pick-and-roll really, and so that’s probably the biggest difference,” White said. “And then, just individual defense coming from that. A lot of isolation, a lot of guarding your yard, and they got a lot of talented guys over there, so make it difficult.”
4. What changed in the third quarter?
The Celtics shot 1-of-20 from three-point range in the first half. It was a complete and utter disaster. But somehow, that was a good thing.
At least, that’s how Joe Mazzulla explained it.
Boston didn’t walk into the locker room upset that they were down by 21 points. They walked in excited that they weren’t down by 40.
“You take a look at the first half, you’re down,” Mazzulla said. “One, when you’re in those situations, I look at them, like, man, ‘I think we’re in a great spot. We’re only down 21. It should be 35 or 40.’ And so, you’re like, okay, yeah.”
That was the first piece of the puzzle. Then, the question became, what went wrong? Mazzulla continued:
“Then I think the second piece of that is, all right, is it effort? Is it execution? Is it a little combination of both? Are we playing really good and not getting the result that we want on offense? Are we playing good defense, and they’re hitting the shots that we want them to take? How do you balance that?”
For Mazzulla, it was a myriad of issues:
“And so, to be down 21 at that half of shooting five percent from three, knowing that there were about 20 possessions that we can control, sweep-through fouls, offensive rebounds, transition, threes,” he said. “You take those things away, we’re gonna go on a run.”
And take them away, they did.
‘Sweep-through fouls’
The Celtics gave up 12 Heat free throws in the first half. That number dipped to six allowed in the second half (four in the third).
Miami’s six first-half offensive rebounds fell to only four in the second half.
And the 14 fastbreak points the Heat tallied in the first half turned into just three in the second half.
Yet perhaps more important than all of that was the Celtics’ ability to keep their heads in the game.
“I thought the guys did a great job having an understanding of, this is the truth, and then this is how it feels,” Mazzulla said. “And then, how do we stick to the truth? And then, how do we keep chipping away? And then, it was 21, and then we got down to 12, and then it was seven, and the next thing you know, we’re up two.
“So, it’s just having an understanding of how the game’s going. In those situations, it’s so easy for emotion to take over and say, ‘Ah, we’re sucking because we’re down 21.’ I didn’t think that was the case tonight.”
That’s something his Celtics teams have worked to perfect. Coming back from being down is a slow burn. Rushing only makes life more difficult.
“You want just encouragement and a reminder,” Mazzulla said. “We don’t want to go out and hit grand slams, and have six-point plays, or feel like we got to do more. So, I mean, I think it’s, one, it’s the maturity of the group. Just having the understanding of, like, ‘Ah, you know’ – And of course, it’s gonna take time. We just added a new guy to the team.
“Everyone’s impacted in some type of way. Just human beings. So, it’s naturally going to go like that. And you got my stupidity that I’m doing, trying to prepare for everything. So, I thought they handled it really well.”
5. Mazzulla’s stupidity?
What was that? Run that last quote back again…
“And you got my stupidity that I’m doing, trying to prepare for everything.”
What does that mean? Well…
“I think you can over-prepare. I think you can overthink,” Mazzulla said. “I think you just get to a point where, okay, we acquired somebody new, here’s all the possibilities we can get to. We may see five of those tonight, instead of just focusing on one or two.
“And some of them, we have to be ready to do right there. So, I think it’s just, how can we—I don’t really believe in simplifying it. We got to find a way to make the complex simple. But how can we do it in a way to where we can just do it quickly and not be overthinking that. So, that starts with me, and we’ll clean some of that up tomorrow.”
It was Vucevic’s first game. Even Mazzulla got a little overexcited, based on his explanation. He wanted to do everything possible to make the most of the new addition. But as a result, he may have overcomplicated the simplifications.
But practice makes perfect. And practice takes time.
That’s it. Baylor Scheierman.
Pritchard exploded in the scoring column. Vucevic showed out in his Celtics debut. White hit the clutch shot. Even Brown scored some big buckets throughout his slump.
But Scheierman was a massive part of Boston’s comeback.
He just knows how to give the game what it needs. If the game needs a three, he’ll make one. If the game needs a ball-handler, he’ll do that. If the game needs a guy to dive on the floor for a loose ball, he’ll do it without skipping a beat.
On Friday night, the game needed hustle defense, offensive spacing, and rebounding. Scheierman went three-for-three.
