What Is The Plan?

[Jiri Welsch]

Here is my over-analysis after one game:

--There will definitely be nights where they shoot teams out of the building and win going away.
--But they don't have good guard defense (except DWhite) and they don't have much of anything from their bigs at this point.
--JB also needs to lose his "shot out of a cannon to start the game" strategy if he's going to be their 1A, because he can't disappear in the second half as a rebounder and facilitator against good teams.
--In short: they don't have much room for error if they're going to have a winning record.

[slamtheking]

That is what I was trying to get across, that this season is going to be a complete waste. A weakened Philly, missing Paul George and a hobbled Embiid still won over the Celtics.

Unless the Celtics get insanely lucky like Dallas, they will not be getting a high lottery pick. Washington, Brooklyn, Charlotte, Chicago, Utah, Sacramento, Portland, Phoenix & New Orleans all have weaker rosters than the Celtics.

Do not forget that Tatum wants to be back by the second half of this season too.

Mazzulla is too competitive to blood the youngsters. There were no minutes tonight for Hugo Gonzales, Scheierman, Walsh, Shulga or Williams.

that remains to be seen.  the C's front court is the worst in the league.  don't be surprised to see the C's in the lottery

Tatum is dead set on coming back as soon as possible, that will add wins.

Other teams that under perform early in the season will tank, the Celtics front office and Mazzulla will not.

Tatum may be dead set on it but that doesn't mean he'll be healthy enough to do it nor does it mean the team will think it's in their best interests to risk his health at the tail end of the season for a meaningless play-in spot

[keevsnick]

Why I'm relatively optimistic after last night:

-Only lost by 1 despite some bad three-point luck, -15 from three.
-Played the floor game pretty well. Won the TO battle 11 vs 14. Tied in ORebs 10-10.
-Jaylen looked good as an initiator. Only 4 assists, but that was largely because nobody could hit a shot off his passes.
-Queta looked like he could be a fine enough starting big.

If they play generally like that and three-point shooting equalizes, they'll win 42-44 games, and there's still some stuff they could clean up.

More on Jaylen's passing: NBA.com has him for 15 potential assists last night. In a normal NBA game that would translate to something like 7-9 assists depending on shooting luck since players typically hit better than 50% of assisted shots. But he only had 4, that's how bad teammates shot off his passes. By way of comparison Cunningham, Harden, Doncic, SGA and Tre Jones all had 17 potential assists in their first game and recorded 10, 11, 9, 5 and 8 assists. 

The one real negative is quick guards could be a problem. White is a great defender, but more so as a team defender than a one on one guy. Pritchard is stouter then he is quick. Simons is below average one on one. They don't have a good matchup for quicker guards, and they don't have the rim protection behind those guys to cover up that issue. guards with speed will be an issue.