Thoughts after the game in full (I missed it again, these early morning games are not kind to me lol):
- Stevens has tweaked his offence a bit so that the offensive load between the big 4 (Kemba, Hayward, Brown and Tatum) has become more balanced. I've noticed that Jaylen now has a longer leash to create offence when he has the ball, which has resulted in some huge games for him lately. One more thing about Stevens' offence is that the Celtics have been feeding the hot hand a bit more - Brown was fed a good amount of looks when he scored a flurry of points in the first quarter, ditto for Tatum in the second.
- Kanter's passing is underrated, I noticed him making some really nice feeds to cutters in this game (and even some entry passes when we had a mismatch inside!). It's pretty big for us since Kanter being able to pass unlocks some extra wrinkles for our half court offence and we need every single one of them to keep our offence afloat in the playoffs against elite teams.
- Tatum's help defence is elite. His length, awareness and deceptive quickness allow him to cover large swaths of hardwood to toggle from one threat to another and generate a ton of high value deflections, steals and blocks (they're high value because they stop near surefire baskets for the other team) without needing to gamble for them (gambling for deflections and stocks makes a player bleed considerable amounts of defensive value when they backfire). His man defence has been a positive as well (although it's worth nothing that this is largely due to Boston's scheme of putting him on weaker and smaller perimeter players, he's probably average to slightly above average in a vacuum when it comes to man defence) due to his newfound ability to recover from a blow-by and rack up deflections/stocks.
- Hayward's passing is really additive. He consistently makes passes that no other member of our core 4 can make - high value passes that take advantage of a defence warping due to a player's threat to score/finish, which results in a good amount of open looks. He's the ceiling raiser of our squad's offence and I hope that he can stay healthy for the rest of the year, including the postseason.
- I hope Love can find another competitive squad to spend the last years of his prime on. He has reinvented his offensive game by becoming an incredible shooter to add to his post game- some of the threes he hit against us were crazy for a big man. His defence doesn't look too bad either, he seems to have slimmed down a bit and that has helped with his lateral quickness.
- One underrated aspect about Brown's scoring is how scalable it is. He can score by cutting and weaving off-ball, he can score as a spot up shooter or finisher at the rim and even create his own offence without pounding the ball for an inordinate amount of time. These can all easily mesh with talented teammates who need the ball, making Jaylen's offence even more valuable than it would seem on paper.
Topic: Cavaliers (9-21) at Celtics (21-7) Game #29 12/27/19 (Read 13401 times)