This has been an unfortunate year for the Boston Celtics. Jayson Tatum, after having COVID-19, took some time to get back to himself and was using an inhaler before games. Just before the end of the season, Jaylen Brown had wrist surgery and was lost for the year. Kemba Walker hasn’t been quite right for chunks of the year, and a year after coming up a game short of the NBA Finals, Boston found itself in the play-in tournament. The good news is that in that play-in game, Tatum dropped 50 points in Boston’s win to earn a first round series against the Kevin Durant, James Harden and Kyrie Irving-led Brooklyn Nets.
For Brooklyn, this is expected to be the warmup to what could be a run to the NBA Finals. From here, it goes to the winner of Milwaukee-Miami and then (barring an upset along the way) Philadelphia in the Eastern Conference Finals. If all goes to plan, this is the series they get their feet wet as a team and move onto bigger challenges. Whether the Celtics can take this warmup and make it something much more nervy is the biggest question facing this series, and that will come down to a few different variables.
Matchup To Watch
How Boston deploys Marcus Smart will be telling. As Boston’s best healthy defender, it would seem likely he ends up on one of two players: Harden or Irving.
There’s a case for him to defend either. When Harden has played, he’s been more of a table settler than Rockets-era Harden who dominated the ball in isolation. Put Smart — who has the strength and motor to battle Harden all over the floor, even if he won’t always be successful — and you’re going to bet making Harden work impacts the rest of the Nets’ offense. It also would seemingly make more sense than trying to put someone like Evan Fournier, who isn’t as bulky, on him.
Irving, meanwhile, would be the choice if Celtics coach Brad Stevens wants to try and limit Irving’s scoring ability and secondary creation that can grow in potency working off of Durant and Harden. It would also seem possible that Smart spends time on Durant if only to throw a different look that way in certain lineups. A speculative guess: Smart starts on Harden, Walker on Irving, Fournier on Durant with Tatum on Blake Griffin. If the Nets go with a shooter or Bruce Brown instead of Griffin in the starting five, that could alter the matchups.
There are no good options here. With no Brown, Boston’s defense just isn’t isn’t as equipped to handle a team like Brooklyn with multiple high, high level creators. Smart remains and he’s awesome, so how he’s utilized probably shapes what the Celtics’ strategy is.
Series X-Factor
If Boston has any hope of making this a series — much less pull an upset — it needs the absolute best version of Kemba Walker. With no Brown, there’s no one else on the Celtics’ roster who can create shots the way Tatum and Walker can. Tatum is bonafide. He’s going to get his and just showed up when his team needed him most in the play-in tournament.
Walker was also good in that game. He moved well and had 29 points on 10-24 shooting to go along with 2 assists and 7 rebounds. Notably, he was 6-14 on three-pointers and may need to keep that volume up if the games turn into shootouts.
Walker’s ability to drive into the lane and dish and make the defense react to him is going to be key. If he can do that with regularity and generate good looks for others — be it Robert Williams and Tristan Thompson at the rim or Marcus Smart and Evan Fournier from three — it would help the Celtics’ chances immensely. Any pressure he can take off of Tatum matters.
For the Nets: Let’s just see what Harden looks like. There’s no reason to think he’s going not be himself, but he’s coming off of injury right into the playoffs. Brooklyn’s margin of error is large because it has three stars, but Harden not at his best cuts into that margin. It should also be interesting to see how Steve Nash does in his first playoff series and how in handles in-game and in-series adjustments when adversity hits, but we may not learn about that in this series.
One Stat To Know
414. That’s the number of possessions that Durant, Harden and Irving have played together this year, per Cleaning The Glass. There are teams in recent history — think the second-era LeBron James Cavaliers — that have not fully meshed until the playoffs and then made a real run to the title. This, though, is the absolute extreme of that and, unfortunately, it’s because of injuries.
Ultimately, does this really matter? Maybe not in round one against a Celtics team that is down its second-best player (Brown) and almost certainly cannot match the offense Brooklyn possesses. (In those 414 possessions where Durant, Harden and Irving were all on the floor, Brooklyn scored an absurd 123.2 points per 100 possessions.) But as the time fully finds itself and racks up court time together, maybe the lack of true cohesion entering the playoffs is a crack Boston can exploit enough to steal a game. Or maybe Brooklyn just goes full supernova and sweeps the series. Both feel possible.
What is most important for the Nets is that, however long this series goes, every minute those players get to play together is a much needed brick added to the foundation of what they hope is a championship run.
