He has the team playing very good defense, but I’m still not loving the offense. Team is just outside of the top 10 in 3pt shot attempts(36.5), and the only team in the league that takes more 3’s(37.7) and shoots a worse percentage than Boston is OKC. C’s are 24th out of 30 teams for the worst 3pt percentage in the NBA.
When the C’s go up against playoff caliber teams, taking and missing so many 3’s will cost them games.
All of this. When the 3's don't fall, they have no plan B. This will catch up to them.
Well since they're 24th in 3PT% that means the 3's aren't typically falling. And they're still ranked 10th in offense and able to win more than they lose. Seems like something good is happening.
The team has been looking good lately and it’s been a lot of fun to watch. Only thing is, they haven’t really been tested during the win streak as only a few teams that they’ve beaten have records over .500 and those that they have beat, were missing major pieces while the C’s on the other hand have been healthy.
Destroying bad teams, which they have done plenty lately, is just as good a sign as beating good teams. The Celts are absolutely trending up.
Here's our schedule and results since the start of the year, with footnotes of who was in/out or made an impact, from
www.basketball-reference.com. I just put it in an Excel sheet to make it easier to track and added the W/L of the opponents at the time we played them. Over this period we are 17-6, of which 7 of the 17 had winning records so our record against winning teams is 7-2.
If we want to qualify those wins we should say that 2 of them were against Charlotte who have slid out of the top 8, Brooklyn who have lost 11 in a row, 1 against a Chicago team missing Lonzo and LaVine, and a Miami team missing Buckets. The flip side to doing that is that we lost games earlier in the season where we didn't have a healthy team due to Covid and other issues and nobody qualified anything for us. End of the day we have to play who we have to play, and get results, and they have definitely been building winning habits - most importantly we have only won 6 of 17 games this season where we shot less than .300 from 3, and 3 of those wins came in the last 4 games (Orl, Den, Atl).
So definitely trending up as you say, with some bigger tests to come on the horizon to give us more information on whether it's a genuine improvement or a false dawn and so everyone can resume wrist slitting again


*just noticed I'm using "they" and "we" interchangeably - bad habit of mine
