Not exactly Celtics news, but if you look at the final 4 teams in the NBA playoffs, they all have good big men. Wemby of course, OKC has Holmgren and Hartenstein. NYK has Towns. And CLE has Allen and Mobley. All these teams have solid or better bigs. This seems to defy the modern day conventional wisdom of small ball. So yes, BOS has a weakness there that needs to be addressed.
On McHale's comments, I am going to offer a different perspective on that. So to me, what he is saying is that if the game plan going into a game is to take 3-point shots, that this is what you expect the defense to be giving you, that if you miss a few 3-point shots, you should go to plan B? How about if the game plan was to pound the inside with McHale and he missed a few inside shots, would you then abandon that game plan?
To me, it is more about reacting to what the defense is doing. If you planned to pound McHale inside but the other team changed their scheme and was doubling him, then yes, react and go to something else. But if McHale is getting good looks but just missing them, do you abandon the game plan? Same with the 3s. If you are missing because the other team is over committing to defending the 3, yes, that means something else is open and you should be going to that. But if you are getting good looks but just missing them?
Yes, I think Brad has to take some responsibility for how they played because this is the team he put together. And I think he knows this, he said it in his exit presser. He shipped out literally all our post players and only got someone like Vuc at the deadline and then he got injured and they never got to really integrate him. He's known as a stretch big but he also has a decent post game. Shame we never saw it.
But it's also worth looking at the data on where our shots came from -
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)
I posted this elsewhere but here I added a "Total Paint" so we can see how many times they did shoot paint shots, either restricted area or non restricted...in the regular season we actually shot 3 more paint shots a game this year than last, and 3 less 3FGA this year than last. And we shot about the same efficiency for both. We also shot 4 more midrange shots since Jaylen took the 5th most midrange shots per game in the NBA, behind DeRozan, Embiid, Ingram and KD.
Where it probably becaome noticeable to people is that in the playoffs, we took 3 less restricted area shots than the past 3 years - those are drives, alley oops and dunks. And we took 8 more 3FGAs than we did the past 3 years - and what made it even more noticeable is we only shot 34% from 3, which is below our playoff average of 37%. And if you did this on a per-game basis I think you will find we shot 45-50% from 3 in the 3 games we won and 25% in the 4 we lost.
With a lot more work I can probably work out how many of those were drives, how many were open, so we can figure out if Philly, with Embiid, walled off the paint in the last 3 games, and the same for the 3s. But those are the raw numbers from
www.nba.com.
