After the All-Star Game, one Celtics source believed some of the team’s best players “just lost focus.” While going 7-6 coming out of the break, Tatum, Marcus Smart and Horford all had negative net ratings, meaning the team was outscored when each of them were on the court. The Celtics’ defense was ripped apart with the starters in the lineup, a revealing development for a team so capable of shutting down opponents.
Some of the players started to believe Mazzulla prioritized the offense too much, according to team sources. Several veterans wondered why the coaching staff went away from Grant Williams, who had a significant role in slowing down Kevin Durant, Giannis Antetokounmpo and Bam Adebayo on the way to the Finals last season. Still, in early March, he received his first DNP-CD since the 2020-21 season. Williams’ playing time was sporadic from that point forward and he again fell out of the rotation when the playoffs began.
The coaching staff believed in Hauser’s offensive production and felt that because opponents were going out of their way to target him and abandon their own offense, his ability to hold up decently in isolation made him impactful. Mazzulla also wanted to get Hauser more experience to prepare him for the playoffs, believing Williams would be ready to go if his number was called. But the team’s veterans believed Williams would be crucial in the playoffs, so Tatum and Brown met with Mazzulla in early March to implore him to put Williams back into the rotation, team sources told The Athletic.
"The stars stepped up and told Joe what they wanted and Joe listened,” a player source said.
After dropping Game 5 of a second-round series against Philadelphia, the Celtics went back to their old starting lineup with Horford next to Robert Williams. The other starters lit up like they had seen an old friend for the first time in decades. Smart said the lineup change made him “ecstatic.”
“That just goes to show you Joe’s learning just like all of us,” Smart said at the time.
That was a sign of the tension inside the Celtics locker room over Mazzulla leaning toward offense. The players understood they had shown defensive slippage earlier in the playoffs and throughout parts of the regular season. Even while beating the Hawks in six games during the first round, they had been gashed periodically by Trae Young. The Celtics nearly bowed out in the second round because James Harden torched them for 40-plus points twice over the first five games of that series, including a Game 1 Sixers win in Boston without MVP center Joel Embiid.
Returning Williams to the starting lineup in Game 6 flipped that series in Boston’s direction. With the old frontcourt duo reunited again, the Celtics held the 76ers to an average of 87 points over the final two games of the series.
For certain players, at least, that was more evidence that the emphasis should have been on defensive dominance all along. After all of the offensive shortcomings during last season’s playoff run, Mazzulla saw the Celtics puzzle differently. He wanted the players to reach a new level as problem solvers. He envisioned a more free-flowing transition game where offense and defense go hand-in-hand and trusted that the team had the talent to play more improvisationally on both ends than it had before.
He wanted them to learn how to diagnose any defensive coverage and come up with solutions on the fly. In early March, after Boston gave up a 24-point lead at home to Brooklyn, Mazzulla called the 3-point attempt rate the most important statistic in basketball. The Celtics played like it. They led the league in 3-point attempts per 100 possessions while ranking second in made 3-pointers per 100 possessions. The problem? When they missed outside shots, they didn’t always have another way to win. They went 31-1 when shooting at least 40 percent on 3-point attempts during the regular season, but fell to 26-24 when falling shy of that number.
Disagreement over Mazzulla’s approach showed in a film session during the second round that dove into the offense, when Brown broke a huddle by saying, “One, two, three, defense,” according to several sources in the room. Multiple players told The Athletic that while Mazzulla had shifted the team’s identity to be more balanced down the middle between offense and defense, they felt that defense wins championships and that last season proved that should be the priority. Players noted they sometimes would come out of the timeouts uncertain about defensive coverages and Blake Griffin, Smart, and Grant Williams, among others, would help the team work things out heading to the court before play resumed.
The strain intensified as the Celtics dropped the first three games against Miami. After giving up a double-digit deficit in the fourth quarter of Game 2, the players had a heated discussion about what they needed to fix, according to team sources. Amid the shouting, Brogdon lit into his teammates, urging them to trust each other like they had all season. The players then sounded shocked after they lost Game 3 128-102.
“I think we have such a high-powered offense with two great superstars and we have such great role guys that no other team really has with so many of them,” Brogdon told The Athletic after losing Game 7. “I think we tended to focus on offense more than anything and making shots and relying on making shots rather than playing defense. And I thought we thought we could make enough shots at the end of the day that defense didn’t have to carry us like it did carry them last year.”
The day after Game 3, Brogdon said the team’s identity had “waned all year long” and he believed the Celtics were still “trying to figure out who we are.” After players spent so much of the season saying they had to not get bored with the little things, it was apparent how much they relied on their shots going down.
“A lot of times our defense has been our kryptonite when we’re not making shots,” Smart said after the season ended.
Following Game 7, Brogdon said teams don’t win championships with a better offense than defense. Tatum and Smart both emphasized that everything for them starts with defense.
Link: https://theathletic.com/4569899/2023/06/01/boston-celtics-joe-mazzulla-wyc-grousbeck-season-recap/
