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Celtics Talk / Re: Fire Joe! ... or critique Joe ... or defend Joe... or worry about Joe's coaching
« Last post by jpotter33 on Today at 01:11:45 PM »26 open 3PTs for us, versus 37 for them. Almost 50% more.
Miami effectively limited our three point attempts, whereas according to the actual players on the court, we left Miami open by design.
Too broad of conclusion based on the data. It is just like Celtics2021 said. Celtics started to miss some open and wide open 3s so made an effort to get to the hoop more, to post up Porzingis (who couldn't hit anything). So our volume of 3PA was less. The Celtics were getting plenty of open and wide open 3PA looks per the data. They just weren't hitting them and drove or posted more.
I am not sure that MIA did anything to take away the 3. And if they did, taking it to the hoop was the right adjustment, we just didn't hit our shots.
I do agree that we will need to defend the 3 better moving forward. I don't think MIA will continue to hit at the same rate (although yes, I said that last year too). I do think that BOS needs to take it to the hoop, not always settle for the 3. Nothing wrong with that. No adjustment needed. Continue to take what they are given.
What I think MIA did better was they extended their defense farther out, got into it earlier. That makes it harder whether you take it to the hoop, post up, or take a 3. There was no particular scheme to take away 3s. The scheme was to make everything hard.
Of course there was. As you mentioned, they extended the D out further on the perimeter, but they also started switching everything and giving us the mismatches to bait us into trying to exploit those instead of taking more threes. This has been an issue for us all year long where we sometimes get too focused on exploiting mismatches even when not working efficiently, which bogs down the offense. This effectively limited our three point attempts, which as we all know does not bode well for us as we generally only win when putting up lots of threes.
All that said, I think the offense was much less concerning than the defense. They’re a good defensive team even without Butler and Rozier, and they can do lots of defensive scheming to mess with us that we can eventually figure out with our elite offensive talent. It’s our defense that was the main culprit last night, as that’s where we have the biggest advantage and should really be limiting them. Instead, we made zero adjustments to our scheme even knowing EXACTLY what Miami was going to do with us just playing the percentages, and it burned us just like it did last year.
This is where Joe is truly awful. He’s too dogmatic and stuck in his ways to adjust his gameplan, which was clearly needed from the get-go last night. At some point, you absolutely cannot just continue to “play the percentages” if they’re consistently beating you. The Ringer podcast excoriated Joe for his gameplan last night and did a good job breaking down some of the lack of adjustments and how Spo exploited them.
EDIT: And to be honest, the entire defensive gameplan from the start is non-sense. Without Rozier or Butler, they simply don’t have enough offensive firepower to beat you playing straight up. So why are we going to this gimmicky defense that gives them open look after open look and just gives them the opportunity and tools to beat us? Instead of gift-wrapping Herro and Robinson and others open threes off the high PnR and/or the over-help on the PnR ball-handler, just play them straight up and make them beat you in iso.m, which is much more difficult for them than hitting step-in threes or threes off the triple threat. It’s ludicrous.
