Fire Joe! ... or critique Joe ... or defend Joe... or worry about Joe's coaching

[ozgod]

What did I do to deserve such sarcasm, Kernewek ?

Joe's offensive scheme is awful and it has directly led us to playoff losses vs inferior teams. I'm hardly the only one saying that. Celtics Strong members comment on it all the time. Even the game commentators and clown show studio ex-players have criticized the Celtics shot selection. Our beloved Larry Bird recently stated the that there needs to be inside options when a team is shooting too many 3's. I played and coached at the small college level and coached in high school, so I hopefully have some knowledge of the game and am not just some guy on the street spewing emotional criticism.

Having said all that, why haven't I been hired as a consultant for the Celtics ?

Not sarcasm - just using you as an example of a poster who regularly points out things (like the above) which don't seem to be materializing on the court for whatever reason (I tend to think it's usually the opposing team's defense). I usually think your takes are pretty good, but I think you tend to ignore the roster's strengths when you discuss the offense in particular.

What points have I made that are not true of this team and Joe's coaching ?
I would say Joe's offense flat out cost us the Knicks series last year when we blew 20-point leads in games 1 & 2 at home because we continued missing 3's and made no adjustments to get better shots and keep the lead. Not quite as glaring but still true for our other recent playoff failures, which have been embarrassing.
I think Joe ignores the roster's strengths and proceeds year after year with the same stubborn scheme, which has been an overall playoff failure.

I don't want to answer for Kernewek, but I think his point is that Brad built a roster around 3 point shooting - that is (supposed to be) its strengths. He traded away our only post players in KP and Al and he didn't replace them until the trade deadline with Vuc, who got injured. We have a rim roller in Q but our only consistent dribble penetration players are the Jays, of which one was injured most of the season, and PP. So I would have expected them to not take as many 2s this year, except the lower percentage midrange shots that Jaylen was taking.

But I wanted to look to see what our shot distribution was over the past few years, by zone, to see if there was a trend, so I went to NBA.com and pulled up our data. For comparison I picked the champions after us, OKC, and looked at regular season and playoffs for both teams (OKC missed the playoffs in 2022-23 so there's no data for them. Here are the results, courtesy of NBA.com:

(click to enlarge)


So in 2022-24 we shot around 23-24 FGA in the restricted area, 14-14 FGA in the paint, and 42 FGA from 3. In 2024-25, with KP injured for large parts of it, our restricted area shots dropped to 20 and our midrange shots to 8, while our 3FGA went up to 47. This year in the regular season we actually shot more non-3s in the regular season (19 FGA restricted area, 18 FGA paint non RA, and 11 FGA midrange for total of 46 FGA non 3s) vs 41 FGA non 3s (and we shot 42 3FGA in the regular season vs 47 3FFGA the year before). So our shot profile this regular season was much more similar to our shot profile in our championship year.

In the playoffs, we took 3 less restricted area shots a game than we did in each of the 3 years prior, and a little bit more midrange (since Jaylen I think took the 5th most midrange shots per game in the NBA, behind DeRozan, Embiid, Ingram and KD). But we took a lot more 3s, we took a total of 46 3FGA a game in the playoffs. And the difference is in previous regular season and playoffs we shot about 37-38%, this postseason we shot 34%. We were particularly bad from the corner where we shot 24%.

So while we diversified our offense in the regular season, mainly taking more midrange and paint shots, in the playoffs they took a lot more 3s, and missed more of them. We just took less restricted area shots (drives and dunks) and probably more floaters.

Meanwhile OKC takes more 2s than us...they take about 50-53 2FGA a game (22 restricted area, 18 paint, 11 midrange, and about 37 3FGA a game. So their offense is a bit more diversified than ours (though we actually shoot the ball better than them in all zones and overall (except in the midrange where SGA is money). The difference is this year they're shooting close to 40% from 3 in the playoffs and we didn't 

I wanted to compare us with a few other teams but it was a lot to type out