On Saturday night, with 7:47 to go in the fourth quarter, Brooklyn Nets guard Dennis Smith Jr. nailed a three-pointer to cut his team’s deficit to only one point. Boston Celtics fans had seen this story before; unable to put a game away in crunch time, it seemed inevitable they would fall back into old habits, wasting possessions with fruitless isolation attempts before choking away a winnable game.
Fortunately for those fans, this is a different Celtics team. After that three-point shot, the Celtics outscored the Nets 28–19, increasing their lead to as much as 14 points in an eventual 124–114 win. There was no pointless time wasting or questionable end-of-shot clock heaves. Every member of the starting five scored during that game-sealing run, including 37-year-old Al Horford, who, starting in place of the inactive Derrick White, was a team-high +29. With that win over the Nets, the Celtics have started the season 5–0 for the first time since the 2009–10 season.
It’s easy to get caught up in early-season hype and there are plenty of reasons to temper expectations lest fans end up reliving the heartbreaks of seasons past, but make no mistake about it: The new-look Celtics are scary. Their success and ability to avoid bad habits in the clutch, against both the Nets on Saturday and the New York Knicks on opening night, are emblematic of the greater improvements to this team. Any doubts regarding the fits of Jrue Holiday and Kristaps Porzingis seem firmly in the rearview mirror; it turns out that adding a 7-foot-2 sharpshooter and the league’s best defensive guard does indeed make life harder for opponents.
Guarding the Celtics’ starting five was always going to be a challenge for even the best defensive teams in the NBA. So far, it has been near impossible for those not quite in that tier. They followed a 126-point outburst against the Washington Wizards on Oct. 30 with an unfathomable 155 points against the Indiana Pacers in a near-record 51-point victory on Tuesday. Those games marked the first time in franchise history that the team scored 75 points in the first half in back-to-back games.
The Celtics’ starting five — White, Holiday, Jaylen Brown, Jayson Tatum and Porzingis — has a net rating of +37.3 in 72 minutes together thus far. That is an offensive rating of 125.9 and a minuscule defensive rating of 88.7, a mark that exceeds the league’s leading team in defensive rating by almost 15 points.
Apart from just the starting lineup, the Celtics lead the entire NBA in points per game, offensive rating, net rating and effective field goal percentage. It isn’t hard to see why. When the Celtics play any combination of their top six — the starters previously listed plus Horford — they are effectively able to find a good shot on any given possession. All six can shoot from deep, while White, Holiday, Tatum and Brown are potent in isolation. Consequently, opposing defenses are constantly faced with difficult choices. Doubling Tatum, one of the league’s best scorers, or any other Celtic for that matter, will always leave at least one sharpshooter open. Switching on a pick will inevitably result in a mismatch, and the Celtics are loaded with guys who have made careers out of hunting mismatches. No player so far has needed to hunt a shot — playing within the offense will almost guarantee a high percentage look for someone on the floor.
In a vacuum, this setup doesn’t seem all that different from the Celtics’ 2022–23 roster; that is until you reckon with exactly how impactful Porzinigis and Holiday can be. For all of Robert Williams III’s strengths, his lack of spacing and inability to create his own shots held back the Celtics’ offense throughout his time with the team. Enter Porzingis, who maintains at least a facsimile of Williams’ interior defense and lob threat but adds extreme range and post-up capacity. The fit seemed perfect in concept and has translated in game as expected, if not better. Porzingis can bully smaller defenders in the paint on switches, as he did against the Nets on a hyper-efficient 8/10 shooting performance, or pop outside and hurt opponents from deep when they worry about the potential of Tatum and Brown to penetrate, as he did with five threes, including the game-sealer against the Knicks on opening night.
Holiday, meanwhile, has filled the hole left by Marcus Smart, and then some. A more reliable shooter than Smart, Holiday brings the same grit and defensive tenacity with an extra inch of height and tremendous rebounding. The only point guards averaging more rebounds than Holiday’s 7.0 per game are Russell Westbrook, Luka Doncic and Ben Simmons.
Most importantly, these Celtics are playing like a team, something that was plainly missing when they were knocked out by the Heat in last season’s Eastern Conference finals. Against the Nets, Tatum got his revenge, as he does, but not at the expense of his teammates — four of the starting five scored in double figures. That has been true in every game so far; against the Miami Heat and Pacers, it was all five. It is easy to preach balanced basketball, but actually accomplishing it is an entirely different feat. When you load a roster with stars who accentuate each other’s strengths and make life easier from play to play, the potential is limitless. The way the Celtics’ roster is constructed, the success of any one player will almost certainly lead to an opportunity for another.
The NBA has been put on notice: The Celtics aren’t joking around. There is a long way to go before any team lifts the Larry O’Brien trophy in June and their bench depth remains questionable, but a healthy Celtics roster has as good a shot as any to be that team. Only time will tell if they can keep it up.
