The Boston Celtics are built to defeat their opponents with swarming, stingy defense, bolstered on the other end by efficient though not particularly explosive scoring. This has been their identity since Kevin Garnett arrived in town and brought his trademark mad-dog intensity with him.
Make no mistake: while it is true that Rondo has emerged as the young leader of this deeper-than-ever Celtics squad, it is still KG who makes it all work. You can talk about the Celtics having a "defensive system" but the truth is that Kevin Garnett IS the system. He's the spider at the center of the web, pulling this string and that string so that the whole thing pulls tight in the right places at the right times, luring, trapping, and devouring unsuspecting opponents. When KG heads to the bench, the defense is just a loose cobweb, and the strands are easily torn apart.
That KG is the key to the Celtics' success is glaringly obvious when one looks at the on/off court numbers for the playoffs this past season. With Garnett on the floor, barking at teammates and opponents alike, the Celtics outscored their opponents by 9.56 points; when he sat down, the Celtics were outscored by 26.25 points, for a net differential of 35.81 points. The next closest Celtic was Avery Bradley, who had a net of 19.44. It's no coincidence that those were without question the two best and most active defenders on the roster last year.
Father time, as always with this team, is the biggest enemy. Due to his age -- 36 at the start of this season -- KG has to rest more and more often. The 5-5-5 plan that Doc implemented last year to save KG's legs so that he can give his all whenever he is on the court and not be completely ravaged by the time the post-season comes around means that the Celtics have to survive for at least 18 minutes a night without Garnett on the floor. Clearly, that was a serious issue for the Celtics in the playoffs. They had trouble competing with their opponents without KG on the floor and so were forced to play him heavy minutes; eventually, he and the rest of the team just ran out of gas.
Danny Ainge went into the off-season knowing that one of his priorities was to do his best to address that issue by rebuilding the bench. How was he to retool his roster so as to avoid that huge dropoff when KG is wearing warmups and waving a towel?
Well, there were two ways that Danny could have tried to solve the problem:
1) Build the bench to hold leads by maintaining the defensive intensity of the starting-5
2) Build the bench to sustain and increase leads by having a number of potent scoring options.
Going the first way would be consistent with the team's general philosophy and identity. It's also more or less the strategy Danny had used when building the bench in the past (spending MLE money on players like Jermaine O'Neal and Rasheed Wallace and targeting 3-and-D vets like Keyon Dooling, Mickael Pietrus, Sasha Pavlovic, and of course James Posey).
The difficulty is that while marginal-to-decent defensive role players are a dime a dozen, if you want to get somebody who can even approximate what KG does as a defensive anchor, you have to spend big bucks, or use a high draft pick.
That's why even limited role players like Kendrick Perkins, Nick Collison, Samuel Dalembert, and Deandre Jordan make upwards of 7-8 million a year, and that's why Tyson Chandler got a max contract. That's also why Danny gambled by using a 1st round pick on Big Ten Defensive Player of the Year JaJuan Johnson, and why he tried to see if he could get something from an under-appreciated player in the D-league like Greg Stiemsma.
Another problem is that if you build your bench with a focus on defense, you place additional stress on the core players (Pierce, Rondo, Garnett) on the team to do the vast majority of the scoring, especially in the playoffs when the going gets tough and every opponent plays at least solid defense.
That dilemma was a primary component of the team's issues in the post-season this past year, as the bench rarely contributed more than single digits in points, and though they stifled opponents for minutes at a time, the team also really struggled to get any of their own points for long stretches.
Given these factors, it's not surprising that Danny went with option #2. Nearly every player added to the roster this summer is an offensive upgrade over the player that was replaced; however, all of them are arguably also a downgrade defensively.
Keyon Dooling --> Leandro Barbosa
Ray Allen --> Jason Terry
Mickael Pietrus --> Courtney Lee
Marquis Daniels --> Jeff Green
Greg Stiemsma / Sean Williams / Ryan Hollins / JaJuan Johnson ---> Jared Sullinger
Sasha Pavlovic --> Kris Joseph
The two exceptions to this trend are Darko and Jason Collins, but neither has a solid hold on an active roster spot, nor has either seen the floor much, despite the Celtics' struggles to protect the rim and stay even on the boards. The thing is, neither Darko nor Collins is much of a factor offensively, and that seems to limit their ability to break into the rotation. Fab Melo is similarly doomed to languish on the bench (or in the D-league) all season, because whatever credible NBA-level skills he might have at this point (and they are few), those skills are definitely on the defensive side of things.
Because the only true centers on the roster are all offensive non-factors, the majority of the minutes at the 5 behind KG have gone to Brandon Bass, who stands 6'7'' on a good day and is not an above average rebounder nor much of a shotblocker. Jared Sullinger (6'9'', 280) is slightly more credible as a center, and has shown a desire to take charges to make up for the fact that he too is not much of a shotblocker. Still, neither is particularly effective at protecting the room, and while they both try hard defensively, neither has the skills to take the reins from KG.
In any case, there's no question that, on paper, the bench has been upgraded very significantly. In the ESPN pre-season awards predictions, two Celtics (Terry and Green) received votes for Sixth Man, and Jared Sullinger received a vote for Rookie of the Year. Clearly there is a lot of respect among observers of the game for the talent on the Celtics bench.
The plethora of options is such that the scoring could come from almost any place in the rotation; in the season opener, when the Celtics were trailing and looking for a boost from former Sixth Man of the Year Jason Terry, the Celtics got 16 points, all in the fourth quarter, from another man who at one point won that award -- Leandro Barbosa, added to the roster only days before. The firepower is in place.
So far, though, the overall results are mixed (of course, we're only three games in, so it's a small sample size).
Bench points in first three games:
vs. MIA: 29
vs. MIL: 31
vs. WAS: 27
That's 29 points per game.
Compare that to last season, when the Celtics got 21.4 points per game from their bench, good for second worst in the league (ahead of the Lakers). Certainly good to see an improvement, but that kind of bench production still places the Celtics in the bottom half of the league, well behind teams like the Clippers and the Hawks.
Though anemic offensively, last season the Celtics' bench held opponents to .389% shooting (2nd behind the Chicago bench), and limited opposing benches to 25.7 points per game, which was #1 in the league.
The stats available for this season are only from the first two games, but in those two contests the C's bench gave up .511% shooting (23rd) and allowed opposing benches to score 34.5 points per game (21st).
The bottom line is that the improvement in scoring off the bench has, so far, not made up for the drop-off in bench defense, and that is part of why the team has been struggling.
One wonders if at some point the Celtics may have to address the lack of a true backup for KG; with all of this depth, the Celtics could have some interesting options around the trade deadline. Though there has been speculation that Josh Smith could make a plausible and enticing target, Smith is a combo forward, not a center. In light of that, a name that might make a lot more sense as a plug-in piece to immediately solve a lot of the team's deficiencies is Anderson Varejao.
There has been a lot of focus through the first few games on the obvious lack of cohesion on the defensive end early in the season -- the Celtics haven't looked anything like themselves on defense, except in the first quarter against a Washington team that seemed incapable of throwing a rock in the ocean. Regardless, for the bench the only thing that matters is putting points on the board when the starters -- KG in particular -- are sitting.
So long as the Celtics roster stays as it is currently constructed, the bench will have a single mandate: score.
Topic: The Bench Unit Has One Mandate: Score (Read 1509 times)