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Celtics Wrap: Boston Back On Track With Electric Win Vs. Lakers
A .500 record has never felt so good


NESN by Alexandra Francisco

Things are really starting to look up for the Celtics, who defeated the visiting Lakers 130-108 on Monday at TD Garden without Jaylen Brown and Robert Williams.

Boston gets back to .500 with the win, improving to 8-8. Los Angeles meanwhile falls to 8-9.


ONE BIG TAKEAWAY
Marcus Smart certainly rose to the occasion with the Lakers in town, keeping them in the game early and setting the tone with physicality against LeBron James, Anthony Davis and Co.

Boston was down 32-18 at one point during the first quarter, not playing its best defense by any means. But Smart learned early in that he could attack the basket, and following his lead, the rest of the team took advantage of the LA bench to take a lead in the second quarter and never really look back.

Smart achieved a season-high 22 points with six assists, four rebounds and a steal, and on the way to the win, the Celtics got 56 points in the paint. Team basketball was played.

STARS OF THE GAME
— Jayson Tatum was fantastic on both ends of the floor, but absolutely took over in the fourth to help extend Boston’s lead to as many as 15 points. A majority of his 37 points came in the second half, adding 11 rebounds, 2 assist, three steals and a block. The best part? He attacked the rim and didn’t resort to ISO when he couldn’t make a play for someone else.

— Dennis Schröder revenge game? The guard carved out his former team’s defense en route to a 21-point, six-rebound and six-assist performance.
— Al Horford and Josh Richardson both get mention here. Horford was glue all game, contributing 18 points, four rebounds and four assists to go with a steal and a block. Richardson was crucial early on, and added 15 points and four rebounds off the bench.

WAGER WATCH
Tatum’s big night could have won you some money. A player prop entering the game had him at +900 odds to drop at least 35 points and 10 rebounds. A $100 bet on such a game would have paid out $900, per DraftKings Sportsbook. Not bad.


UP NEXT
It’s a quick turnaround for the Celtics, who face the Oklahoma City Thunder on Saturday for the second night of a back-to-back. Tip off from TD Garden is at 7:30 p.m. ET.

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Once the Celtics realized the fakers couldn't guard the paint it was on. Marcus and the boys went into attack mode. Schroder and Tatum went strong instead of dribbling 20 seconds away before getting into the play. I saw a lot of Richardson when I lived in South Florida. He's a premier on the ball defender, and an intelligent player who lets the game come to him . I think he was reticent at first, searching for his role. He's back to being himself. The early season JT nightmare is , one hopes, over. The outside shooting is a work in progress, but winning tends to cut the tension that disrupts shooting. Beating LA without two of our starters makes a powerful statement. Let's hammer OKC and Houston.

Just spoke to a childhood friend who’s in the movie business in LA. He basically said the Westbrook situation is not working, that the defensive role players that they traded or got rid of are thriving and after having the top defense 2 years in a row, now they have no defense. When I mentioned Tatum finally had 2 monster games in a row, he said everyone has a career night against us, LA. He pointed out Schroder, Caldwell-Pope, Caruso, Kuzma were all very good defensive players and now they have Westbrook, who he said didn’t shine at all when Lebron was out. And I thought we had problems.

Great offensive game from Marcus Smart, imagine if he could bottle this efficiency? I think he gets up for the Westbrook matchup, like the J’s like to go after Lebron and Kawhi. I really like the Menace, he’s a 2 way player and in the guard match up, he was the quickest gunslinger out there. 2 monster games from Tatum in a row, got enough help tonight and some vintage Tatum moves, strong drives to the basket in the heart of the LA defense. If only we had Jaylen adding a few of his signature monster type finishes/dunks and RWill. This team can get on a nice roll once we get all our parts, despite the injuries we seem to have found our defensive identity, even though it was the offense carrying us with 130 points without Jaylen and RWill against our storied rival. Sure didn’t see this coming.

Hi,
Blowing LAL out of the water is always great.
I didn't see it coming, especially in the 1st quarter. It seemed Celtics continued to play as they did in ATL, i.e. sans defense.
Thankfully, they changed that. In addition, they were slicing and dicing Lakers to the point that Vogel threw the towel with more than 3 min left.
The announcers were talking about Lakers with Lebron back could be contenders - I don't think so, especially looking at what they showed last night.
Happy that JT is getting back to his usual form.

AK

Who had us blowing out the Lakers without 2 of our starters and LeBron returning?  I sure didn't.  I can't wait for the Comments From The Other Side, later today.  I'll bet none of them did either.

The needle on my Weird shoot-o-Meter got buried when the game ended on b2b 3 pt fgm by first Enes Kanter and then Dwight Howard.  That's when I really knew I wasn't in Kansas anymore.


Brian Robb @BrianTRobb
yesterday
Celtics outscored Lakers 100-70 in the final three quarters.

38 points is the most points the Celtics have given up in the 1st quarter all season.  Shrugging that off and coming back from that and blowing their opponents out shows resilience, grit, mental toughness and Pride.


Every time Jayson Tatum goes off on the Lakers like this you know their fans have to be thinking "we could have had him, but Magic took Ball instead", and then they do a palm smack into their foreheads.




Despite having AD, Howard and LeBron the Lakers have no baseline defense.  Once we cracked their perimeter defense they were helpless.  We outscored them in the paint 56-36 and most of those points for us was off of penetrations and not good ol' post-ups.  

Chris Forsberg @ChrisForsberg_
about 16 minutes ago
Marcus Smart and Dennis Schroder credited with a combined 26 drives vs Lakers. Their production on those drives: 11-12 FG 4-4 FT 27 PTS 3 AST Celtics went 20 for 27 at rim overall and drew 9 shooting fouls.

Davis had 31 points but was 0-3 from 3.  7 points were from the line, so that leaves 24 points, all from 2.  How many of those 24 were in the paint?  Most, I seem to recall.  That means the rest of the Laker team was pretty much non-existent in the paint.  As I said, they not only have Davis they have Howard and LeBron, and they were useless in the paint.

Grant Williams made a lot of mental mistakes on defense.  He cheated too much and lost his man (one such mistake was a beeline dunk by LeBron because Grant was in no-man's land between the ball and LeBron) and just generally was unhelpful.  However, he did one thing that really popped my eyes open.  He had the ball and saw a lane to the basket.  He was guarded by LeBron.  He drove, LeBron tried to move him off his line of attack with his body and Grant put his shoulder into LeBron and moved LeBron off his line instead of the other way around.  LeBron is now in his 19th season and I have never seen a player be fast enough to blow past him and also strong enough to muscle him.  When he has been beaten off the dribble, or out-muscled, LeBron always made a phenomenal uber-athletic play at the rim.  Not this time.  What Grant did that blew my mind is that he showed me the end-of-the-road is coming for LeQueen.  He's making $41M this year and $44M next year.  He's going to be 37 years old on December 30th and will be 38 when his contract expires after next season.  That'll be it because, thanks to Grant Williams, I now am seeing that his body is starting to break down a bit.  


Ben Rohrbach @brohrbach
yesterday
Tonight marks only the 23rd time in 1,317 games that LeBron James did not make a free throw.

And he cried like a little LeBitch the whole time too.


I feel comfortable saying that Dennis Schroder won the "who played point better for the Lakers" comparison with Russell Westbrick, at least for last night.  Schroder claims he never saw that $84M contract he allegedly walked away from but, even if he did, he'd still be cheaper than the $44M Westbrook is costing the Lakers.  Both Westbrook and LeBron will be making $44M next year.  That's $88M in salary for 2 players.  The only thing that scares me, a little bit, is that Jeannie Buss will recognize a mistake when she sees it game after game and does a Westbrook-Simmons trade.  I don't think it would/could be a straight up deal, there'd have to be picks too, but that would give another young player alongside AD.  It would also breathe life into Daryl Morey's rapidly decaying body.



Jay King @ByJayKing
yesterday
The Celtics are absolutely begging Russell Westbrook to shoot. They could not be begging harder.


Smart really got up for this game.  Gimme more of this and we are good.  Aside from his outstanding defense he also took 13 fgas and only 2 of them were 3s.  That's what I really want more of.  I want more of less 3s.




Chris Grenham @chrisgrenham
yesterday
Marcus Smart: "We're not perfect, but the fight is in us. ... It might not look like it right now, but we're going to turn things around."

Jay King
Jay King @ByJayKing
yesterday
Marcus Smart said he didn’t want the Celtics to fall into bad habits of settling, wanted to drive and produce better looks. Said there were “a lot of matchups” for the Celtics to exploit.


Josh Richardson works hard.  He's not much of a scorer but he's a hard-nosed on-the-ball defender and has a nose for the ball.  He got a putback just because he moved to the open spot near the rim and the ball came to him, but that's how it works.  You work for your position and it pays off sometimes.   Josh Richardson, in my eyes, is Romeo 2.0.  He has the instincts, the nose for the ball, the defense but is not a go-to scorer.  He's what Romeo should aspire to become in the coming years (that's why Josh is Romeo 2.0.  He's the next version of Romeo). We need scoring off the bench, and that might mean that Richardson gets traded for such a player, but JRich is as good a rotation player as there is and is very professional about it.  Not every player can come off the bench cold and be effective from the first whistle.  Josh Richardson can.  To be honest, if I had to choose between JRich or Romeo, who gets traded and who stays and gets an extension, that's a tough question for me to answer.

He's also starting to understand what it means to be in green, and that's important too.

Mark Murphy @Murf56
yesterday
Josh Richardson: "This is one of the best crowds I ever played in front of."


Jay King @ByJayKing
yesterday
Ime Udoka on Al Horford: “He has fingerprints all over every game pretty much.”


A. Sherrod Blakely @ASherrodblakely
about 11 hours ago
"That's why I came here; one of those reasons was to play with Al (Horford) again. What he's doing now is unbelievable. He's doing the biggest things to win games. It's impressive to see."- Dennis Schröder


A. Sherrod Blakely @ASherrodblakely
yesterday
Al Horford was an All-NBA Defensive second-teamer in 2018, with the Celtics. When the case is made for him this year, this is one of the games that will strengthen his candidacy.




7 boards for Kanter in 16 minutes.  With The Time Lord not punching in we needed that.  Force the Lakers into taking long shots and don't let them get 2nd ones.  The Lakers only grabbed 33 rebounds, 7 offensive.  We had 51 and 12.  We were down 15.3 rpg without RWill and Jaylen.  Everybody needed to step up.  Kanter got almost half of those 15.3.  Smart and Schroder got 14 combined.  Their season-to-date combined averages is 7.8rpg, so there's the other half.  Well done.

Mark Murphy @Murf56
yesterday
Enes Kanter is setting some meaty picks. That one on Avery Bradley cost him a whistle.


John Karalis @RedsArmy_John
yesterday
Boston's offensive rating jumped more than a full point to 106.1 tonight and their net rating went from -.2 to +1

We now have the 11th best defensive rating in the league, but if you look at the last couple of weeks we have been absolutely ferocious.  I wonder what our defensive rating would be without all those OTs running up the points?  Well, here's my answer:

John Karalis @RedsArmy_John
yesterday
Celtics are 6-3 over their last 9 games. In those 9 games Boston is 2nd in the NBA defensively (100.5 DRTG), 15th offensively (107.5 ORTG), and 3rd in Net Rating (+7)


Sean Grande
@SeanGrandePBP
Since the 2-5 Celtics arrived in Florida November 2nd, only Golden State and Phoenix have a better Net Rating.  

Boston's gone 6-3 since, with 6 of those 9 being on the road.  They're 8-8 on the year, despite having played an NBA-low 6 home games.




Sean Grande
@SeanGrandePBP
When the icon returns to Boston…nobody sits.





Mark Murphy @Murf56
yesterday
Now Paul Pierce is leading cheers during a timeout. They've brought out the artillery for this one.


Boston Celtics @celtics
yesterday
Jayson Tatum says of playing in front of @Paul Pierce and @RealBillRussell during a Celtics win over the Lakers at home, "It's a surreal moment."


Abby Chin
@tvabby
Cedric Maxwell just broke out the cigar! Jayson Tatum sinks a corner three to put the #Celtics up 17 on the #Lakers with 5:02 to go!


They taste better when you take the wrapping off, Max.


Jared Weiss @JaredWeissNBA
yesterday
Jayson Tatum got Evan Turner here on FaceTime, says he’s gonna come take Scal’s job after Xmas

Just when you thought your smile today couldn't get any bigger...

https://www.espn.com/nba/boxscore/_/gameId/401360056


Bob


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This one is a tough one for which category to put it in. The quarter may keep it out of an elite victory category but then it was against the Lakers with LeBron. I'll have to cogitate some more on this one. The subsequent 3 quarters were dominating. I just don't get how Davis can score the way he does but be nowhere to be seen on defense in the lane swatting flies. Their lane defense looks like ours at times. Hence why we are both hovering around .500 currently.

I love being wrong on this site. I called a wipe out by the Lakers with LeBron coming back. Definitely missed that one. But still going to carry the WOLOWOLT moniker until a win streak of more than 2 games shows its face. Tonight will be as good a place as any to start changing that.

I do see the Nets coming to Boston on the not too distant horizon. Let's get through tonight's and Monday's games to see where we are. Feeling cautiously optimistic!

db

dbrown4 wrote:This one is a tough one for which category to put it in.  The quarter may keep it out of an elite victory category but then it was against the Lakers with LeBron.  I'll have to cogitate some more on this one.  The subsequent 3 quarters were dominating.  I just don't get how Davis can score the way he does but be nowhere to be seen on defense in the lane swatting flies.  Their lane defense looks like ours at times.  Hence why we are both hovering around .500 currently.  

I love being wrong on this site.  I called a wipe out by the Lakers with LeBron coming back.  Definitely missed that one.  But still going to carry the WOLOWOLT moniker until a win streak of more than 2 games shows its face.  Tonight will be as good a place as any to start changing that.

I do see the Nets coming to Boston on the not too distant horizon.  Let's get through tonight's and Monday's games to see where we are.  Feeling cautiously optimistic!  

db          

Me too I had this pegged as a beat down by them, especially after that first quarter; to my amazement we systematically took them apart every quarter after that, couldn’t believe we got it up to 20 without the Timelord and Jaylen. Can’t wait to see us fully healthy soon, we know we can defend and hopefully PP and some others can get untracked further….so much fun seeing Tatum get in his all NBA zone, I think it’s coming if we can just get and stay healthy.

It is always great to beat LA.

The Lakers cannot defend a lamp post. And they cannot shoot.

Wow, if Bron, Westbrook and AD where the 3 wisemen, JC would never have been discovered.

dboss wrote:It  is always great to beat LA.

The Lakers cannot defend a lamp post.  And they cannot shoot.

Wow, if Bron, Westbrook and AD where the 3 wisemen, JC would never have been discovered.

dboss,

Unless he was represented by Rich Paul and Klutch Sports. Then LeBron would find him.


Bob


.

Good ones, dboss and bobh!  Didn't see those coming!!  And timely as well!  The best humor always has multiple layers of laughter! I grew up in a family and extended family of comedians.

db

I think we should keep Schröder- even if we have to sell the Old North Church or start a Fund Me to raise the money. Hawk

Early going, I'm with you, hawksnestbeach.  Boston typically doesn't let talent escape that works well right out of the gate.  Menace fits this description and is beginning to have Celtic written all over him.  

Let's see how Ime responds once we get our two starters back and how he lines everyone up.  Should be very interesting.

db

P.S. Just noticed we are in a 4-way tie for 6th!! And for 5th in the loss column. Only a few ways to move up in the standings and only one is directly controllable by the Celtics

1) Wait for those above you in the standings while you try to win more games. Too passive.
2) Let those above you beat each other up. The more teams above you this becomes fruitless.
3) Beat those ahead of you each time you have the opportunity. THAT'S the ticket!!