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Celtics Wrap: Jaylen Brown’s Big Night Lifts Boston To Win Vs. Raptors
 
NESN by Lauren Campbell on Fri, Oct 25, 2019 at 9:34PM
 
The Celtics have their first win of the season. After dropping their first game of the 2019-20 season to the Philadelphia 76ers, Boston returned home for its first game at TD Garden against the reigning NBA champion Toronto Raptors.
 
A pre-game speech from Kemba Walker, 25 points from Jaylen Brown and 22 from Tatum helped pave the way for the Celtics to take a 112-106 win Friday night at TD Garden. Walker (22), Gordon Hayward (15), Marcus Smart (10) and all had double-digit points for Boston, with Walker really turning it on in the fourth quarter with 11 of his 22 points. With the win, the Celtics moved to 1-1, while the Raptors slipped to 1-1.
 
Here’s how it all went down:
 
STARTING FIVE PG: Kemba Walker SG: Jaylen Brown SF: Jayson Tatum PF: Gordon Hayward C: Daniel Theis
 
STRONG START FOR BROWN Brown started off hot in the first, making two strong layups before completing a perfect pass to Hayward for a 3-point shot. The two teams traded buckets for much of the opening 12 minutes, and Toronto looked poised to take its lead back, but Walker swatted the ball away to keep the slim 13-12 Celtics lead intact in the final five minutes of the quarter. Boston was able to take a 22-21 lead into the second, with Brown leading all scorers with six points, while Kyle Lowry netted five for Toronto. Grant Williams accounted for three assists, while the team as a whole was strong on the offensive front, picking up seven offensive rebounds on 15 misses.
 
 C’S HANG ON FOR SLIM HALFTIME LEAD Like the first, the second quarter remained close with the teams trading leads throughout. But Boston was faced with an injury in the first four minutes when Daniel Theis hit the floor after backpedaling on defense and was in visible pain. He hobbled off the court and back to the locker room immediately. He was ruled questionable to return with an ankle sprain. The Celtics continued to battle, and upped their lead to four when Tatum’s original shot missed and rebounded by the Raptors. But a heads-up defensive play by Williams followed by a feed to Tatum gave him a second chance to make the bucket. Williams had four points, five rebounds and two steals in seven minutes. Toronto caught fire, going on an 11-0 run to take a 44-38 lead coming out of a timeout midway through the quarter. But Boston tied it at 46-46 before taking a slim 50-49 lead into halftime. Brown remained hot, closing out the first half with a game-high 13 points, including this gem. Tatum was just behind Brown with 11. Lowry led the Raptors with 11 points.
 
CELTICS DOWN BY SIX Theis returned to the bench after being diagnosed with an ankle sprain and immediately made an impact with two blocked shots. Brown continued to be a force and helped up Boston’s lead to four. The Raptors took a five-point lead with 5:42 left in the third, but Brown notched his 20th point of the game with a 3-point shot to make it 66-64 Toronto. But Boston wouldn’t go away quietly, re-taking the lead with just over a minute to go with a shot from beyond the arc by Tatum. Toronto took back the lead and went into the fourth with a six-point edge. Brown and Tatum led the way for the C’s with 20 points apiece. Lowry (22) and Pascal Siakam (25) were the leaders for the Raptors.
 
STRONG FOURTH SEALS IT FOR C’S Smart accounted for the Celtics’ first six points of the fourth with back-to-back trey’s, keeping Boston in it, 84-82. Toronto responded with a three of its own to go up by seven, forcing Brad Stevens to call a time out with 9:49 left in the game. Walker began to heat up after a tough first half, nailing down a 3-pointer to bring the C’s within two. But each time they’d come close to tying the game or taking the lead the Raptors seemed to respond right back with buckets of their own. The teams traded leads with five minutes to go, with Boston taking a four-point lead after a block led to another Tatum trey. The Celtics held on to a four-point lead for the final minutes before upping it to six on two made free throws to help seal the 112-106 win.
 
UP NEXT The C’s waste no time getting back to the court when they travel to New York to take on the Knicks on Saturday night. Tip-off from from Madison Square Garden is set for 7:30 p.m. ET.

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Great game, with a lot we can improve on. Toronto was drilling 3's and we hung in there. Our two J's has basically the same line score. both with 25 pts, both with 9 rebounds, Jaylen with 2 blocks, Jason with 3 steals. While Jaylen had a better shooting percentage, Jayson was a lot better for the 3 pt line. Jaylen had one turnover and Jayson 0 turnovers. Team only 9 TO's. good sign.. All in all I think we can expect to see both of them improve during the year.

Kemba and Gordon can just play their games and I will be good. Loved Kemba's defense along with Grant and Robert Williams. We took charges tonight and I hope it gets contagious. Kemba, Grant, and Marcus all took charges.

Call it an anomaly.  Call it the luck of the Irish

Brown and Tatum each put up 25 points 9 rebounds and 4 assists.

There is no precedent for that.  It's like hitting the slots twice in a row.

As I have stated.  Build around our bookend wings.

Most impressive tome was our offensive rebounding. I'm sure it warmed Cowens heart

Now that's team basketball. Kudos to all. So refreshing to see Kemba Walker recovering from a poor start with a smile and lot's of heart in contrast to you know who. And to boot we've got some good looking rookies, starting with G. Williams.

Berlin-T

my observations (for what they are worth):

good:

walker found his shot and took over when we needed it.

Brown played like a top player on both ends.

Haywards' defense was much improved from the first game.

The Williams men both played solid rotational minutes

Smart is Smart.

the Bad:

Tatum's missing too many easy shots

Semi is playing against centers at time

the Frenchman does not have Brad's confidence right now, it seems.

Overall:

good win against an eastern team who will be battling for a playoff spot this year.

Hi,
This game we had much better offensive flow then against 76's. Kemba listened to the coaches, team mates or himself - stopped me-balling and started team-balling. I hope this trend will continue.
Despite the absence of Kanter they managed to limit Gasol to just 1 point and 5 rebounds.
Also, it looked like the team did hear the coach about the importance of FTs - almost 94%. Please keep it at that level.
Overall, it's a very good win considering that opponent shot 47% and 50% from deep.

AK

Pace matters as Boston was bad shooting the ball.

Eye popping stat 109 FGA

A very nice win.  Apparently the reports of our death after the Philly loss were premature.

The things I liked the best about this win are

1.  We stayed aggressive and engaged.
2.  We outscored them in the paint 54-36
3.  We usually got the ball over half court with 20 seconds or more left on the shot clock
4.  We grabbed 21 of my beloved offensive rebounds, and that was without Enes Kanter
5.  The game was tied with 3:41 left and we executed in crunch time
6.  We took an eye-popping 109 fgas, in part due to all the extra possessions our offensive rebounding gave us but also due to us getting into our offensive sets a little quicker.  The difference between getting over half court with 20-21 seconds left on the clock instead of 16-17 creates more possessions/game.  More for them too, of course, but more is better.

What I didn't like about this was our shooting, obviously.  We shot 38.5% for the game.  It is an absolute marvel that we won, by 6 and not at the buzzer, shooting like that.  It's the 109 fgas, 10 steals and only 8 turnovers.

A great game by Kemba.  He was 1-9 from the floor at the half, and 4-13 for 11 points after 3, but was playing great defense all game. He finally settled down and kicked into high gear in the 4th.  He took 3 offensive charges, 2 of them in the 4th quarter.  He ended up 8-22, going 4-9 for 11 points, in the 4th.  He had a bunch of family up from Connecticut for the game.  They got what they came for in the 4th.

A great game by Jaylen too.  Aggressive all game and, most importantly, stayed out of foul trouble.  25 points on 11-20.  He was 2-7 from 3.  That's not good, but what is good is that means he was 9-13 from 2.  He attacked constantly and as we all know Jaylen Brown is a significantly more effective player when he is aggressive.  9 rebounds, 2 blocks.  This game would have been very, very different without him.  Take Jaylen's numbers out of it and we would have been 33.7% from the floor.  Think of just how big a blow out, and not in a good way, this would have been if Jaylen Brown just played one of his more "normal" games.  Also, think about just how weak our offense is when we would have shot low 30% if not for our 3rd or 4th option.  We won, that's great, but this is the 2nd game in a row where our offense sucked.  Jaylen also had an amazingly beautiful 30' bounce pass to the streaking Gordon Hayward.  It was gorgeous.  Between two defenders and came right up into Hayward's hands without him having to bend down or slow down.  Perfect.

Jay King @ByJayKing
yesterday
Jaylen Brown said he was more excited about his long bounce pass to Gordon Hayward than he was about any other play he made tonight.

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Tatum was 8-22.  That's 36% and that's not good.  In the 2 games so far he's averaging 36.4%, so it isn't just this game, it's both.  I'm expecting this to pass, he's a better shooter than this, but until it does we are going to struggle since he is our #1 or #2 option.

Adam Himmelsbach @AdamHimmelsbach
yesterday
Jayson Tatum is 8 for 15 on threes and 8 for 29 on twos so far this season.

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Grant Williams with some great small ball 5 on the MUCH bigger Marc Gasol.  He didn't score much, 4 points on 2-9, but he had 7 rebounds in 22 minutes and 6 of those 7 were offensive rebounds.  There's 6 more possessions for us, 6 more fgas.  Even at 38.8% those 6 additional possessions/fgas are worth 4.6 points assuming they're all 2s.  If there is a 3 sprinkled among those 6 extra shots then we are looking at our 6 point margin of victory, courtesy of Grant Williams.  This is why I am in love with offensive rebounding and am very impressed with Grant Williams' game last night.  2-9 isn't good but everything else he did was.  His 4 assists also tied him with Tatum and Smart for most assists for the Celtics.  Let's see if Kemba keeps talking like this if we lose:

Jay King @ByJayKing
yesterday
Kemba Walker on Grant Williams: “Big time. I love that kid.”

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Jared Weiss @JaredWeissNBA
yesterday
Brad Stevens: “I texted Grant yesterday and told him that he needs to know all of the 5 by tomorrow. And he does.”

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The other Williams boy is looking like the light bulb has finally come on.  He'll be the starter by mid-year at this rate, he brings things to the table our defense needs.

A solid game by Hayward.  Not like vs Philly, but solid.  His offensive rebound late in the 4th sealed our win.  I will take 15 points on 5-12 and 8 rebounds (3 offensive) from our #3 option, especially knowing that, if Tatum or Kemba are out or having a bad game he is quite capable of putting up 25-30.

WTF is going on with Poirier?  I would have sworn he'd get some playing time with Kanter out and the 7'1" 255# Gasol in but he got a Coaches - DNP.  He seems to be ok with it, for now...

Vincent Poirier @viinze_17P
yesterday


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Theis bruised his left ankle but played through it.  It was sore after the game.  He may not play tonight vs NY.  If Theis is out and Brad doesn't play Poirier tonight...


We only had 8 turnovers, they had 23 and we also were a +8 on steals (10 vs 2).  We got 18 more points off of turnovers than them (26 vs .  High energy levels on defense but careful on offense.  We shot like shit but we weren't reckless with the ball.  Eventually the shots will drop, as we saw with Kemba in the 4th, we just can't dig ourselves into too deep a hole with lazy defense and/or high turnovers.  We showed last night we can beat a very good team, the reigning World Champions, without being able to buy a bucket.  It can be done, and we proved it.  We also showed that shooting 50% from 3 on almost half their fgas, like they did, doesn't necessarily mean they'll win (although that is where the smart money is going...).  

Jay King @ByJayKing
yesterday
Jaylen Brown on defense: “Smart is leading the way and I’m right behind him.”

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Pascal Siakem is a monster.  People who thought Toronto would fall through the floorboards when Kawhi left didn't see him coming.  He's going to be the next Paul George.  Some have said he's like Giannis but he's not the ballhandler and creator The Freak is, but you can still do a lot worse than PG.

Van Fleet had 8 points on 2-11.  That's from Kemba's defense.

Gasol was 0-8.  2 of his fgas were in the restricted zone, 1 other in the paint and the other 5 were outside.  I guess Brad saw something.  He saw that Gasol doesn't want to dominate inside anymore, he'd rather be a shooter from the arc.  He was 0-4 from 3.  Why is the biggest man in the game shooting from outside like that?  Well, for one thing that's the new NBA (yuck) and perhaps because he's 34 years old, 35 in January.


Tom Westerholm @Tom_NBA
yesterday
Kemba Walker on the fans: "Best fans in the world, man. This fan base is no joke. They create the energy."

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https://www.espn.com/nba/boxscore?gameId=401160659




bob



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John Karalis  
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@RedsArmy_John
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I don't want to overstate things here but this is a rookie calmly delivering a nice pass to Kemba on a backdoor cut. It's nicely recognized, calm, on point, on time.
https://twitter.com/RedsArmy_John/status/1188124806681640960


bob


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My 2 cents...

First time we didn't lose to the 3-ball. Several games last year our excuses was they just couldn't miss from 3-ville. They just about couldn't miss last night.

No Edwards? Really could have used him early on with the shopping malls we were assembling shooting 3's. If he was chucking up bricks, he would have fit right in. Otherwise, he would have been the hero again. Mystery there. Also, his jersey top was different from everyone else's. What was that all about ?!!

Whoever mentioned the turnovers last game is onto something. Smaller lineups implying better ball handlers? Two different games but same results there. Also we created a ridiculous number of them for TOR. Kemba effect?

Kemba can play "D" as well as score lots of points. And doesn't bitch about it or spread malcontent.

Hayward very efficient and timely with his scoring. I'm happy.

All 3's and paint scoring. Welcome to the new NBA. It even looks like Brad has put an ultimatum out that if you shoot a mid-range jumper, you'll be coming out for a while or something.

FT% and Fouls back in line. If we had made even the average FG% to go with all the attempts (109) we'd be coming in at 125-145 points a night. Good luck loses very many games with that. Defense can always be better but everyone is helping.

Please no back-to-back relapses against the very hapless Knicks.

db