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Celtics Wrap: Jaylen Brown, Marcus Smart Fuel OT Win Vs. Magic
Brown had 50 points in the win


NESN by Alexandra Francisco

The Boston Celtics continue to struggle with consistency, almost falling to the Orlando Magic on Sunday after coming off their best win of the season over the Phoenix Suns.

Fortunately they got their acts together down the stretch in regulation for a 116-111 overtime win.

With the victory, the Celtics improve to 18-19 while the Magic fall to 7-30.

ONE BIG TAKEAWAY
Only the Celtics could go from defeating a team with the best record in the NBA to keeping things this close to the Magic, but it’s just what’s come to be expected.

Turnovers plagued this game from the jump, hanging a dark cloud on any positives. Their early aggression and a lead of as much as 14 points was flipped in the third, where a 20-4 run and 19 turnovers to that point helped the Magic go up 77-65.

Boston continued to trail much of the fourth quarter, making a late comeback to creep within two points with 1:30 on the clock. Marcus Smart and Jaylen Brown helped the Celtics force overtime, and that energy carried on, with Boston squeezing out of regulation and overtime despite 21 total team turnovers.

STARS OF THE GAME
— Jaylen Brown secured a double-double, leading Boston with a game-high 50 points, 11 rebounds, four assists and a block. The seven turnovers were tough — more than twice as many Celtics teammate in the game — but he helped spark the fourth-quarter comeback to force overtime.


He kept up the energy in OT, too, with a dagger 3-pointer that came right before a pretty behind-the-back assist for Josh Richardson.


— Terrence Ross seems to have a knack for giving Boston a hard time and Sunday was no exception — even off the bench. He led Orlando with 33 points, five rebounds and three steals.

— Smart had the play of the game, getting an unlucky roll on a layup on one of Boston’s final possessions but making up for it on the other end. He forcefully grabbed a steal the very next play and made a pass in transition to assist Jaylen Brown in tying it up. He finished with 17 points, seven rebounds, seven assists, a steal and two blocks.


WAGER WATCH
Entering the contest, DraftKings Sportsbook had Jaylen Brown listed with -115 odds to score at least 27 points. A $115 bet paid out out $100.

UP NEXT
The Celtics stay at home until Wednesday, when they hose the San Antonio Spurs at TD Garden at 7:30 p.m. ET.

112288

Finally I saw Jaylen Brown step up to the plate when it mattered. Gladdened my heart. I am now starting to get hopeful.

That’s what superstars do, you have to carry a team on your back at times….Sam Jones, Hondo, Bird, Pierce have all had to do it. Rumble young man rumble!!

The Kardiac Kids strike again.  I swear, these guys are gonna give me a heart attack with their inconsistencies.

This should have been one of the easiest games in the next 5 weeks.  That meant it was going to be an edge-of-the-seat nail biter, we just didn't expect it.  We thought the win over Phoenix meant we had seen the light.  Silly rabbits.

Jared Weiss @JaredWeissNBA
yesterday
Dennis Schröder: "shoot happens. It shouldn't happen, but it happens."

He may be German, but Immanuel Kant he isn't.  He does, however, have a point.  A lot of it was on us but those refs were shite.  There were a couple of phantom calls at key junctures by ref Mousa Dagher, who has 4 years of NBA reffing experience.  One was a foul on Grant on a Ross 3pt fga, which went in giving him a 4-point play, when clearly there was no contact.  And he was standing right there.  That happened with just 1:07 left in OT and the Celtics up 6, making it a one possession game again after Ross hit his frito.  Another was a phantom foul on Smart, giving him his 5th.  That happened with 2:50 left in OT and the Celtics only up 1.  I try not to bitch about the refs, but I still do, but I very rarely single one particular ref out for chastisement.  This is one of those times.

We were down 14 points when Ime called a time out with 4:20 left in regulation.  We went 8-11 the rest of regulation, zero turnovers.  Aside from the obvious "shooting 73% is good" I like the 11 fgas.  That's a lot of fgas in < 4 1/2 minutes, especially when you only take 86 in 53 total minutes.  Excellent rally, not just because of the results but how we did it.  We had a couple of steals, created a couple of turnovers for them but didn't have any of our own despite our turnovers being the 2nd biggest storyline of the game after Jaylen's 50.

This performance might shut the amateur GM natterers saying "trade Jaylen Brown" up for a while.  That, alone, would make this game a blessing.  Our offense was "give it to Jaylen".  It's hard to complain about that, he scored 50 on a very efficient 19-29 (65%) and 5-10 from 3, but we don't want to live or die by that.  Witness his 7 turnovers.  Having said that let's also add a little perspective.  Jaylen had 5 turnovers in the first half, he added 1 more in the 3rd and then only 1 more in the 17 minutes of the 4th quarter and OT, and he played every single minute of the 4th quarter and OT.  A good scoring start, but an ugly floor general start, but he got stronger and settled down when it counted.  He scored 24 of his 50, going 9-14 and 2-4 from 3 in those last 17 minutes.  He was, in short, a monster.  Do we want to run our offense this way?  Bigger picture, Hell NO!, but it worked for this game because nobody else was getting the job done.  We shot 45% as a team despite having a guy who took almost 34% of the team's fgas shooting 65%.  That means the rest of the team shot 35%.  That's the problem!!  It seems to me that there are differences between Jayson's turnovers and Jaylen's.  Jayson gets doubled and doesn't pass out quickly enough and, as a result, they're bad passes that result in turnovers or steals.  Jaylen's seem to be because he either dribbles into traffic, tries to split defenders, and gets stripped OR he tries a spin move and forgets to bring the ball with him (he can, and does, do spin moves where the ball is on a string but sometimes it isn't).  The latter he can just practice more on, really get his handle down.  It seems like it has taken a step back this year, perhaps because he's also trying to be a passer and this addition to his game has made the game speed up a bit for him instead of slowing down, but this is a practice thing, I believe.  The former is just poor judgement.  Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown are marked men.  The whole league knows they don't want to pass and, when they do pass, wait too long to pass.  That's why they both get doubled immediately, or the defense sags on them.  They've been effectively scouted.  Jaylen should stop trying to be Kyrie Irving on his drives.  Nobody has Kyrie's handle (or his flat earth/flat head brain) except maybe Steph.  Bottom line, Jaylen wouldn't let us lose, and we didn't.  We've been hoping for a player besides Tatum who wanted to take over a game for the win.  Say 'hello' to Jaylen Brown.

For those of you who don't know, Jaylen Brown's Twitter ID is FCHWPO.

Boston Celtics @celtics
yesterday
#JaylenBrown says of his #NBAAllStar-caliber, 50-point effort: “Faith, Consistency, Hard Work Pays Off.”


Brian Robb @BrianTRobb
yesterday
Jaylen Brown: "Ime has been great...he's trusted me to make plays for myself and my teammates."

Jay King @ByJayKing
yesterday
Ime Udoka on Jaylen Brown: “with him it’s just not overthinking it. Just taking what’s in front of him.” Said Brown gets “tunnel vision” sometimes, but Udoka sees progress and believes Brown is getting more comfortable as a playmaker and taking what the defense gives him.

Chris Forsberg @ChrisForsberg_
yesterday
Jaylen Brown summing up the night in his postgame walkoff with @Brian Scalabrine: “We just needed to flip* win.”


Sean Grande
@SeanGrandePBP
Jaylen Brown with the 11th 50-point game in Celtics history, the 4th in the last 15 years...



Sean Grande @SeanGrandePBP
yesterday
January 2, 2022 Jaylen Brown + Patriots




Horford weak offensively, 3-8 for 9 points (although 3-8 is still better than the average of everybody not named Brown.   ) but 8 rebounds and 5 blocks.  No RWill, no Enes, no front court except for Big Al.  His job was to stay on the court as much as he could and hold the front court fort as best as he could single-handedly.  Orlando had a two-headed monster with Carter and Bamba.  Carter had a great game, but not Bamba.  The Magic had a total 3 blocks.  Al, as I said, had 5 by himself.  Maybe my expectations for Al are lower than everybody else's, but I think he gave us what we needed last night in the absence of Robert Wiliams, a rim presence.

Dennis Schroder is starting to irk me.  After 3 he had 8 points on 3-10 and his defense was pretty poor.  On offense, aside from his shooting, he was tentative on the attack.  To his credit he rallied in the 4th and OT by going 4-4 and 2-2 from 3 for 13 points but his first 3 quarters put us in the position where we needed a big rally to win.  And, also to his credit, he had 7 assists and only 2 turnovers, as did Marcus Smart.  25 assists on 39 fgm is a very good number and these two guys ran that train.

Our bench scored 14 points.  Terrence Ross scored 33 on 11-19.  Almost 31 year old Ross is out of place with Orlando's youth movement.  What would it take to pry him out of the Magic's hands?  Ross, along with Lou Williams, has been one of the premier shooters off the bench for years, with a promotion coming as a result of the retirements of Kyle Korver and JJ Redick.  I hope Payton Pritchard never took his eyes off of Terrence Ross last night.  I know Jaylen was a great show but watching Ross was an education.

Thank Goodness we were playing the 7-30 Magic.  The odds of us winning with 21 turnovers would be almost nil otherwise, 50 points or no 50 points.  Once again, pulling our heads out of our own arses just in the nick of time, we only had 2 turnovers in the 4th and OT.

https://www.espn.com/nba/boxscore/_/gameId/401360365


Bob


.

Bob, I see the glass half-full and filling. No Timelord, no Tatum, no problem, ultimately. Schröder is hard to assess over a half season, but I’ll take 21 points, 7 assists. At full-strength, this team can beat anyone (or lose to anyone). I’ll take that, at this stage of the season, because the talent is there to thrive in April. My concern is RW, and was going into the season. Ole Al cannot stop the drive against a good team, Kantor is a turnstile. I seriously underestimated GW, but he is no center. Absolutely agreed we need to keep JB! Go Celtics! hawk

I wish this signature game by JB would put to rest all the trade Jaylen tweets.  It probably will not because too many in the sports media care more about convincing fans that they (the sports experts) know what's best.  Clearly, they do not.

We have 2 top 15 scorers in the NBA on our team.  If you cannot build around that something is wrong with your design plan.

Give Ime a full deck to play his hand. As much as this team deserves their share of criticism, it is undeniable that they actually have not had a complete healthy roster all season.

Let's just keep the game in prospectus, Orlando is one of the worst teams in the NBA, just slightly better than Detroit, and we had to have a career game by Brown and overtime to pull our buns out of the fire.

Brown ain't scoring 50 every game to bail us out. I always said he was a great player and in some aspects of the game, better than Tatum.

112288

112288 wrote:Let's just keep the game in prospectus, Orlando is one of the worst teams in the NBA, just slightly better than Detroit, and we had to have a career game by Brown and overtime to pull our buns out of the fire.

Brown ain't scoring 50 every game to bail us out.  I always said he was a great player and in some aspects of the game, better than Tatum.

112288

The 50 burger naturally gets the spot light and it should even if it came at the expense of a crappy team. They still had to win the game. It was in the end a team effort. Only a Marcus Smart rips the ball out of an opponents hands with the game on the line.

Before JT was hit with his 2nd bout of Covid he was putting up 27.9 PPG in 12 December games. In Jaylen's last 7 games he has scored 50, 24, 30, 26, 25, 34 and 30 points. That's around 31 PPG.

Now we got to get JT back and hope that the two of them can be cooking at the same time.

dBoss,

What I look for now with the Celtics who are at best a mediocre group of basketball players, is a team willing to play hard defense on a consistent basis for the remainder of the season.  This is a flawed team with a lot of me first players, and not, me pass first , or me play defense first kind of players.

You can talk about the numbers that Tatum has put up and Brown, but that has not translated into having a winning record.  That was obvious with their west coast swing until now.

The Celtics have been my team since 1958 and emotionally bought into them until their 20+ year collapse.  I again bought into them from 2007 through the rebuilding years until a few years ago in 2019/2020 when I noticed a rot beginning to grow within the team culture.

Right now I am taking the Missouri approach to reinvesting emotionally into them again.........You know the Show Me State!

I have never rooted for another NBA team when I have turned negative on the Celtics causing my blood pressure and infliction points to be turned up by their poor play.

I am beginning to think there may be some underlying problem with ownership that is adding to this mess.

Any way, the Celtics are in need of some scoring and defensive talent that I hope Brad is able to bring in.  This is a rebuild on the fly which can take until next training camp to accomplish.

112288

112288 wrote:dBoss,

What I look for now with the Celtics who are at best a mediocre group of basketball players, is a team willing to play hard defense on a consistent basis for the remainder of the season.  This is a flawed team with a lot of me first players, and not, me pass first , or me play defense first kind of players.

You can talk about the numbers that Tatum has put up and Brown, but that has not translated into having a winning record.  That was obvious with their west coast swing until now.

The Celtics have been my team since 1958 and emotionally bought into them until their 20+ year collapse.  I again bought into them from 2007 through the rebuilding years until a few years ago in 2019/2020 when I noticed a rot beginning to grow within the team culture.

Right now I am taking the Missouri approach to reinvesting emotionally into them again.........You know the Show Me State!

I have never rooted for another NBA team when I have turned negative on the Celtics causing my blood pressure and infliction points to be turned up by their poor play.

I am beginning to think there may be some underlying problem with ownership that is adding to this mess.

Any way, the Celtics are in need of some scoring and defensive talent that I hope Brad is able to bring in.  This is a rebuild on the fly which can take until next training camp to accomplish.

112288

112288

I hear you. It challenges our patience as fans.

The decision to build around the Jays was revealed halfway through last season and has continue this year. At the same time the Jays have been tasked with becoming more complete basketball players and not just high end offensive weapons individually. I think both of them are trying to do that.

The 50 points and the 7 turnovers from Jaylen stand out but those 2 assists late in the game in a win or die situation by JB was great. Of course I am referring to the fast break pass to Josh for a layup and the corner 3 from Al.

I think we still have to give it more time. The decision to build around those guys is logical in my mind. The process however is impacted by securing the right pieces to put around them. The owners have spent money when Danny wanted to sign a free agent or make trades but right now the Celtics are still in a recovery mode from past failings. They have some tradable assets in both players and future draft picks to use along with TPE's. The only long term contracts are for those core guys that we can move forward with.

We have been a .500 team all year long so quite naturally many fans want to see some roster moves before this years' deadline. I think it would have to be a killer move to make a big difference. I really do not expect to see that happen. This year is a bridge year where we hope to see continued improvement from the young guys that will help to raise their asset value. The Danny Ainge hoarding of draft picks era is over.

If the team can be healthy for the most part I expect that they will play above .500 basketball the rest of the way.

I saw no fans out there on any blog or anywhere else predict that the Celtics would win the title this year.

I am of the mindset that while there are flaws on this team, a couple of moves can make a huge difference. Just look at the Bulls sitting atop the East.

I don't watch every game but I do watch a fair number of Celtics games.

This was the first time I saw JB really step up when needed. I am not talking about hitting one or two big shots when the ball found him. I am talking about competing, maintaining composure and executing over a stretch, when needed. Doesn't matter that it was Orlando and how we got there. The point is, it appears to be a breakthrough for JB. I sincerely hope that it is so.

Quoting from Bob's post: "Ime Udoka on Jaylen Brown: “with him it’s just not overthinking it. Just taking what’s in front of him.” Said Brown gets “tunnel vision” sometimes"

That to me is the key. I have been very frustrated with JB's uni-dimensional focus. The end of this game was different.

I am a fan and fans grasp at straws. I am grasping at this straw.

dboss wrote:

112288 wrote:dBoss,

What I look for now with the Celtics who are at best a mediocre group of basketball players, is a team willing to play hard defense on a consistent basis for the remainder of the season.  This is a flawed team with a lot of me first players, and not, me pass first , or me play defense first kind of players.

You can talk about the numbers that Tatum has put up and Brown, but that has not translated into having a winning record.  That was obvious with their west coast swing until now.

The Celtics have been my team since 1958 and emotionally bought into them until their 20+ year collapse.  I again bought into them from 2007 through the rebuilding years until a few years ago in 2019/2020 when I noticed a rot beginning to grow within the team culture.

Right now I am taking the Missouri approach to reinvesting emotionally into them again.........You know the Show Me State!

I have never rooted for another NBA team when I have turned negative on the Celtics causing my blood pressure and infliction points to be turned up by their poor play.

I am beginning to think there may be some underlying problem with ownership that is adding to this mess.

Any way, the Celtics are in need of some scoring and defensive talent that I hope Brad is able to bring in.  This is a rebuild on the fly which can take until next training camp to accomplish.


112288

112288

I hear you.  It challenges our patience as fans.  

The decision to build around the Jays was revealed halfway through last season and has continue  this year.  At the same time the Jays have been tasked with becoming more complete basketball players and not just high end offensive weapons individually.  I think both of them are trying to do that.  

The 50 points and the 7 turnovers from Jaylen stand out but those 2 assists late in the game in a win or die situation by JB was great.  Of course I am referring to the fast break pass to Josh for a layup and the corner 3 from Al.  

I think we still have to give it more time.  The decision to build around those guys is logical in my mind.  The process however is impacted by securing the right pieces to put around them.  The owners have spent money when Danny wanted to sign a free agent or make trades but right now the Celtics are still in a recovery mode from past failings.  They have some tradable assets in both players and future draft picks to use along with TPE's.  The only long term contracts are for those core guys that we can move forward with.  

We have been a .500 team all year long so quite naturally many fans want to see some roster moves before this years' deadline.  I think it would have to be a killer move to make a big difference.  I really do not expect to see that happen.  This year is a bridge year where we hope to see continued improvement from the young guys that will help to raise their asset value.  The Danny Ainge hoarding of draft picks era is over.  

If the team can be healthy for the most part I expect that they will play above .500 basketball the rest of the way.  

I saw no fans out there on any blog or anywhere else predict that the Celtics would win the title this year.  

I am of the mindset that while there are flaws on this team, a couple of moves can make a huge difference.  Just look at the Bulls sitting atop the East.  

dBoss,

I am with you as well.   I think we as Celtic fans have to not hang on any great game or performance or modest win streak as the TURN or rainbow after the storm that we are now sailing into SAFE HARBORS and we are on our way.  That is where I forced myself to be now with no emotional commitment, and not getting pissed to a point of throwing my sneaker through my wide screen!

Great performances will be a measuring stick for management to know who stays and who goes.  That will happen hopefully during the course of this year with some trades and in the summer with free agency and other trades.

One point you did raise that now requires a question. You said that the 2 J's are learning to become complete players.  Well was it not Stevens job to mold them into complete players when they joined the team as rookies and over the course of his coaching tenure??????????

Makes me question, was Stevens doing his job correctly by bringing them along in their growth and maturity as players in the NBA?

I think you pointed out that they do still need to grow, but this growing by them was somehow lost by a few years under Brad!

112288

John Karalis @John_Karalis
about 2 hours ago
League' last 2 minute report shows a few missed calls on both sides last night. Among them, you all were right about the phantom foul on Grant Williams on OT. Should not have been a 4 point play. But later they missed a call on Richardson. Tough night for officials both ways


Bob


.