I haven't seen Stevens change what he's doing once really. The better players you have, the less you should just be chucking up 3's. They can do more. Winning on 3's is how Butler gets upsets in March Madness vs the Dukes of the world. But the thing is, Stevens isn't coaching Butler anymore. He's coaching Duke, and I'm not sure he's figured that out yet. I hope he does soon.
The major achilles heel of the team this year on offense, I would say, is the lack of free throws. They're basically at the bottom of the league in that category.
On defense, there's not much they don't do well, though their defensive rebounding has slipped a bit since Baynes went out.
If Brad's system were the problem as far as the free throws go, you would expect that players that came to the Celts from other teams would see their free throw rate drop noticeably.
Yet I don't see that.
Horford averaged 1.8 and 2.2 free throw attempts per 36 his last two seasons in Atlanta, and has been at 2.2, 1.9 and 1.4 in Boston.
Irving's FTA per 36 actually went up to 4.9 last year after average 4.1 and 4.7 the previous two years in Cleveland. He is down at 3.8 this year, however. But again, that's not so far off what he did a few years ago in Cleveland.
Marcus Morris's free throw rate has actually gone up since he came to Boston from Detroit.
Aron Baynes this season has his second highest free throw rate of his career, though last year he had a down year. He's been up and down in that category his whole career though.
I'd say the biggest disappointment in terms of not getting the line enough is Jayson Tatum, who seems as though he ought to be able to generate a healthy number of free throws. He's sometimes compared to Paul Pierce, but Paul got to the line a lot. Tatum really doesn't.
But it's not like Tatum got to the line a ton in college. He only averaged 4.8 free throws attempts per game in college despite playing 33.3 minutes and functioning as one of his team's top scorers.
So I think you have to look at the roster construction, too. Are the Celts built to play a different way than they do?
It certainly seems to be the case that the players have the physical ability to get to the line more. But even when they've played on other teams for other coaches, they haven't really played differently in that regard.
So if anything you could say that Brad isn't expecting players to change who they are under them, instead letting the players be who they are within his system.
It's hard, I think, to argue that Brad's system is causing players to be less aggressive or efficient than they would necessarily be otherwise.
As for the three pointers, yes, Brad does emphasize his team taking a lot of threes.
But they're also a good shooting team, so that makes sense. After starting the season badly, the Celts are now top 10 in Effective Field Goal % (before the last few losses they were closer to top 5).
And again, I think if you look at the roster it's hard to make the argument that they could be successful trying to play a grit-n-grind, interior focused style.
Ainge put together a roster to compete for a title, which in the current era means being able to play on the Warriors' terms. So there's a lot of guys you would categorize as "wings" and "swings," and not a lot in the way of guys that have made their bread in the NBA getting to the hoop.