the NBA is all about matchups right? so what happens in one round doesn't necessarily translate to a different team. Minnesota beat Denver, but does that mean Dallas would've rolled Denver? it probably would've been a rolling in the opposite end with Jocic dominating Dallas.
Celtics match up better with Dallas than they would with Minnesota. Unlike facing minnesota, Dallas can't just hide Kyrie/Luca every time down the court on defense. Why minnesota never attacked luca i'll never know.
But, this isn't a situation where Boston will have an offensive liability on the court. You will have some combination of Holiday/brown/white/tatum/Porzingis/Horford/pritchard/hauser out there at all times.
Horford/Porzingis loom large in this series because their 3pt shooting will take lively/gafford out of the paint on the perimeter spacing the floor. If those guys want to crash and stop brown/tatum from slashing you will leave them open for wide open 3's
celtics also love matchup hunting. in the last 2 matchups, Brown had his way with Luca making him work for it being physical.
on Defense, you cant fully stop Luca/Kyrie. But I think we have the horses to make it harder on them than Minnesota did. 2 of the best defensive guards in the league on kyrie in WHite/Holiday? and for Luca i expect Brown/tatum to take that assignment
Match ups are important, but they are also 2-way. It may have been true that MIN was able to match up better against Jokic with Gobert and Towns but who does DEN have to match up to Luka and Kyrie? I think DAL would have beat DEN, unless Murray really turned it around. But that doesn't matter, we get DAL.
I don't think it matters to DAL who they match up with. They are going to play the way they play. Luka and Kyrie are going to dominate the ball. It is all they got. So far, no one has been able to stop that. Not a quick athletic team (OKC), not a big team (MIN), and not LAC who was a pretty good defensive team at times in the regular season.
With all the switching and match up hunting that goes on these days, it is hard to control who will have to match up vs. Luka or Kyrie. Luka in particular will create a switch to get the match up he wants. The key to me is to keep Luka on the perimeter. We can start out with Brown on him (for example), but they will try to force a switch. It will be an interesting chess match. But I feel that we have enough good defenders that we should be able to keep Luka on the perimeter, even after switches. MIN often ended up with Kyle Anderson on Luka. I am sure that Luka liked that match up. We have better options to switch than MIN did. Brown, Holiday, White, Tatum, even Hauser should be able to keep Luka out of the paint. If Horford or Porzingis or Kornet get stuck on Luka, we probably have to double and reset.
Going the other way, I see it as hard for DAL to defend all our guys. We shouldn't even need switches. They will likely double Tatum but they can't double everyone. We should be able to drive past guys. They have rim protection, but our bigs can hit 3s. Or go for lob-dunks when their bigs rotate. Our strength is that we have 5 guys on the floor that can score most of the time (exceptions are Kornet and Tillman who hopefully won't play much). We need to make sure there is no place for DAL to hide their weaker defenders or no one they can leave open when they double/rotate.
Topic: Celtics 2024 Playoff Run Thread (Read 133791 times)