How Brad Steven's bench of misfits helped make the Boston Celtics the hottest team in the East

How Brad Steven's bench of misfits helped make the Boston Celtics the hottest team in the East






Boston Celtics forward Jae Crowder (99) has been an unlikely success story on the bench. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)
Print Email Jay King | mjking@masslive.com By Jay King | mjking@masslive.com

on March 18, 2015 at 6:30 AM, updated March 18, 2015 at 9:59 AM




BOSTON -- As Avery Bradley discusses the Boston Celtics' playoff pursuit, he sounds a bit like Muhammad Ali. That comparison sounds crazy, but perhaps you will understand in a bit.

Bradley may or may not know anything about boxing, but he has talked about the postseason all year long. Early, his words sounded empty. Yet now that the Celtics have surged into a virtual tie for seventh place in the Eastern Conference, he can look back and say, as he did Monday night, "We set our mind to it and started speaking it into existence."

Within a few breaths, the shooting guard adds, "We never thought we didn't have a chance to make the playoffs. And now we're right there."

So did the Celtics really believe in themselves the whole time? Or did they need a winning streak to put meaning behind words that used to be empty?

"I am the greatest," Ali used to say. "I said that even before I knew I was."

Would he have become the greatest if he said anything else? Was he even being serious? Who knows.

The Celtics are fun again. They have won 10 of their last 13 games. Despite a recent rash of injuries to key contributors, they have mixed and matched and kept on marching forward. This is cause for celebration, even if it's a mild celebration, regardless of what Ali believed decades ago or Bradley believed months ago.

The Celtics have confidence in their playoff hopes now. That's easy to see.

"We know what we need to do as a team," Bradley says. "We know how we need to play in order to be successful every single night."

How did the trust grow? Where did it begin? With the obvious warning that the success might not last through the week, never mind the rest of the regular season, how did the Celtics, who have won 10 of their last 13 games, become the Eastern Conference's hottest team?


The helpful bench

Regardless of who the second unit has included lately, the recipe has been the same: spread the floor with shooting bigs, hand the ball to a penetrating point guard (either Isaiah Thomas or, during his injury, Phil Pressey), and let the magic flow. Some faces have changed, but the foundation has not. The bench scraps to defend at a reasonable level so it can downpour beautiful basketball (at least by Celtics standards) onto its foes. The small-ball offense was cute when it took down New York, intriguing when it toppled Charlotte, and later revealed itself as a consistently reliable strategy - heck, it even worked against the big, bad Memphis Grizzlies.

"When we're out there, we do a lot of switching and create a lot of problems for the other team," said Jonas Jerebko. "If we can still rebound the ball and play defense with a small lineup like that, why not keep doing it?"

At first glance, the Celtics aren't deep. Jared Sullinger is out for the season, Kelly Olynyk missed a bunch of time, and Avery Bradley and Thomas have both suffered recent injuries. At different times, the second unit has featured a rookie who still looks lost (James Young) and a second-year point guard shooting 33 percent for his career (Pressey). Stevens consistently relies on a forward who barely played in Dallas (Jae Crowder) and a backup who Detroit did not mind losing (Jerebko). Lately, the Celtics have even turned to a wing who played three whole games for the Pistons this season and looks ready to audition for White Men Can't Jump: the Italian sequel.

Stevens inserts a few bench parts with some starters sprinkled in or vice versa, or sometimes he throws in the whole second unit.

It has all worked.




Isaiah Thomas
Boston Celtics guard Isaiah Thomas (4) has been huge for the bench, when healthy.
AP Photo/Bill Haber

Obviously, Thomas' playmaking is critical. An efficient pick-and-roll scorer long before he arrived in Boston, Thomas' ability to crack defenses and force them into a rotating frenzy has been huge for everyone on the bench. His high-scoring ways, especially in the fourth quarter, have helped the Celtics pull out wins. But his relationship with the rest of the bench has been symbiotic, a factor that continued when Thomas got injured and Pressey was called into action.

"Our second unit, just like with Isaiah, has so much skill on it that you can't over-help," Stevens said recently, according to the Boston Herald. "There's more openings. It's not a revelation for Phil. It's more the spacing of the other guys around him. But Phil's been great. He's played a great three games and we wouldn't be in this situation without him. He's been a third-string guy, and we can throw him in there and never miss a beat."

Never miss a beat. That's been the theme for the Celtics lately. Add an important player, subtract an important player, whatever. Stevens said he looks for lineup combinations that work, and predicts or adjusts to which ones will succeed against a certain opponent.

"It's a lot of times why we've started the second half differently than the first," he said. "We're trying to find what works best for us against the team we're playing that night. And it's not always going to be the same thing, especially with our best scorer out in Isaiah. So we're just going to have to figure it out, night-in and night-out."


But the starters are struggling

Throughout most of the season, the Celtics have struggled to score with their starting lineup. Even as they charge toward the postseason, that remains startlingly true, as the current first unit -- the most frequently-used lineup for the entire season -- has barely scored more effectively than the league-worst Philadelphia offense.




Tyler Zeller
The Celtics starting lineup has been the beneficiary of a big lift from the bench.
AP Photo/Doug McSchooler

In the modern NBA, it's almost impossible to score with three guys (Evan Turner, Tyler Zeller and Brandon Bass) who can't or won't shoot 3-pointers, a lineup-wide lack of ball-handling creativity, and nobody who can consistently draw fouls. Add in Marcus Smart's recent inability to find the bottom of the net, and Boston's current starting five -- the most frequently-used lineup for the entire season -- has combined for 47.6 percent true shooting while sharing the court. Effectively, they are a five-man Josh Smith.

Why doesn't Stevens shake things up? 1. The Celtics are winning games. 2. The bench has been great. It would be tough, and maybe unwise, to break up a bad starting lineup during a time of sustained team success. Sometimes Stevens will start Crowder or Olynyk in the third quarter. Still, at least while the winning lasts, the starting lineup appears likely to stay.

"It's an interesting group because we've really had some great starts," Stevens said. "Like the Golden State game, we had 38 (points) in the first quarter. (Against the 76ers on Monday), we had 38 in the first quarter. Those guys were hitting everything they threw up and really clicking. Other times they haven't been quite as good. I think it's more, hey, we're going to have some inconsistency scoring the ball. We just can't be inconsistent guarding. And I think that's what we have to focus on, especially while Isaiah's out. Hopefully we can maintain a consistency in playing on a string defensively with that group because that group should be pretty good defensively."

Pretty good, yeah. But that doesn't make up for the incompetent offense -- though, to the starters' credit, they have not let games get away.

Jae Crowder used to be a part of the minimal-scoring first unit. Now he has shifted into a different role that suits him better.


The surprising Crowder

Admit it. Even if you realized Crowder could play, you never thought unleashing him as a positionless bench guy would launch the Celtics toward the playoffs. But this is where we are.

Since yanking Crowder out of the starting lineup on Feb. 3, the Celtics are 14-6, and his production has soared. It's not about his individual stats, though, but what he does for the team. Lately, the dreadlocked, linebacker-looking glue guy has looked like Boston's Tony Allen, a defense-first, toughness-always, identity-changing force who tends to make a positive difference even on the occasions when he shoots too many jump shots.

Is it too early to make a legitimate Tony Allen comparison? Yeah, of course. Crowder will need more than a great month to compare to the man who has pushed the Grizzlies onto their current Grit n' Grind throne. But over the last week, Crowder spent time guarding Rodney Stuckey (Indiana's suddenly high-scoring guard), Zach Randolph (one of the NBA's toughest low-post threats) and Jeff Green (a tall wing capable of supreme athletic feats). And he handled them all well.

Crowder's ability to guard multiple positions -- and switch screens with other versatile defenders, like Marcus Smart, Evan Turner, Brandon Bass and even Jonas Jerebko -- allowed Boston to get through a stretch of games when it missed both Sullinger and Olynyk. It also helps the Celtics maintain their defense while going to a quicker, more skilled, space-spreading unit.

Entering Monday's meeting with Philadelphia, this is how Crowder lineups had fared over the previous 19 games (otherwise known as "the stretch when the Celtics played their most successful basketball"):



Jay King @ByJayKing
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Since Jae Crowder became a positionless destroyer of foes, here are his six most frequent lineups:
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During that span, Crowder lineups scored 108.5 points per 100 possessions, which would qualify for the third-best offense (behind only the Warriors and Clippers) for the entire season, compared to 93.5 points per 100 possessions when he sat. Playing some minutes with Thomas certainly helped, but just about any unit with Crowder has been a killer lately, including during the games Thomas missed due to a bruised lower back.

When the Celtics initially acquired Crowder, president of basketball operations Danny Ainge called the forward "undervalued." That might have continued to be the case if he had stayed at starting small forward. Instead, a role change led to a more prosperous fit.

"I think he's added to what we want to be," Stevens said recently. "He's a skilled guy on offense. He's fearless. And he's a guy that can guard multiple positions, and does so with tenacity. So you love guys like that. He's been a good pickup for us."

To say the least. Crowder has been the most valuable player exchanged in the Rajon Rondo trade. It will be interesting to see what type of contract he commands in restricted free agency this summer -- and what the Celtics are willing to match.

One person the Celtics already have locked up beyond this season has set the tone.


The Brad Stevens factor

Crowder's emergence as a small-ball threat coupled with Turner's occasional moonlighting at point guard begs a question: Is there anything Brad Stevens will not try?

"I think the biggest thing is, we've been forced into that a little bit," he said. "We wanted to give Evan that shot at playing point guard in the preseason, but we were also forced into that because of (Rajon) Rondo's injury. Jae's had to play multiple positions because we lost bigs for a while. Kelly was out and we really only had three bigs.

"One of the things that I personally place a high, high value on are basketball players, not positions, because you can win with good basketball players altogether. Hopefully we can continue to grow in those areas and continue to get these guys better and be superstars in their natural positions, but also as versatile as they can be because the more positions you can play, the longer you're on the floor."

Despite Stevens' insistence on saying he's been forced into some of his lineups, he deserves praise for his creativity. By all means, credit Stevens. He has knitted a winning streak out of a starting lineup that can't score, a bench that consists mostly of other teams' scraps, and an entire roster that thinks one month together - with a whole bunch of key injuries, mind you - counts as continuity. He diagrammed a game-winning play to beat Utah, an alley-oop to go ahead of Memphis, and has revealed himself as a wizard of after-timeout sets. The Celtics do not shoot the ball well. They do not have a lot of size to deter opponents inside. They make up for it by limiting turnovers (during their current 14-6 stretch, they rank first in turnover rate), maximizing their amount of possessions (No. 8 in offensive rebound rate over the same span), and hustling inside their system, sometimes with a quicker group trying to play bigger than it is.

All season long, Stevens has been insisting what he said Monday after beating Philadelphia: "Even when we were losing earlier in the year, I felt like we had made a lot of progress tactically and technically on both sides of the ball."

Did they always believe? Did they claim  to before they really did? Who knows. Who cares. The Celtics are fun and competitive. Go buy a cheap ticket while you still can.



bob




.

"One of the things that I personally place a high, high value on are basketball players, not positions, because you can win with good basketball players altogether. Hopefully we can continue to grow in those areas and continue to get these guys better and be superstars in their natural positions, but also as versatile as they can be because the more positions you can play, the longer you're on the floor."


love this

sometime we are a little too fixated on 1,2,3,4,5

beat

I absolutely agree.   The distinctions often seem artificial and arbitrary.  I mean Tim Duncan is a 4 who can play like a 5 who can play like a 4 who can play like a 5...etc, etc

High value on basketball players not positions.

Amen.

With all due apologies to Lee Lauderdale, this might win the award for single best article of the year.  I'm going to watch Jay King, just like I determined after only a handful of games that I was going to watch Jae Crowder (who became my favorite current Celtic in those few days).  Who knows?  Maybe I'm just on a "J" kick.
 
The recent success of the Celtics has made it very difficult for scribes to find new and interesting perspectives from which to say pretty much the same thing.  King is one of the few who has really succeeded, and he has done it partly by identifying new slants and partly by adding value to a few old ones.
 
• His discussion of what I'm starting to call the "Castoff Crew" (aka the bench) is inspired— especially passages such as the following: “Regardless of who the second unit has included lately, the recipe has been the same: spread the floor with shooting bigs, hand the ball to a penetrating point guard (either Isaiah Thomas or, during his injury, Phil Pressey), and let the magic flow.  Some faces have changed, but the foundation has not. The bench scraps to defend at a reasonable level so it can downpour beautiful basketball (at least by Celtics standards) onto its foes. The small-ball offense was cute when it took down New York, intriguing when it toppled Charlotte, and later revealed itself as a consistently reliable strategy - heck, it even worked against the big, bad Memphis Grizzlies.”  That’s a beautiful turn of phrase combined with pithy perspectives.
 
• King just might have happened on the quote of the year from Avery Bradley: “We set our mind to it and started speaking it into existence.”  Was King the first to use this quote?  Would a basketball player actually wax that poetic?  Who cares?  It’s great reading and carries great meaning, and that’s what counts.
 
• King even brings my old friend, continuity, into the conversation with the interesting observation that it's possible for a workable degree of continuity to surface in as little as a month.
 
• Of course, in my book, it doesn’t hurt at all that King makes it a point to give Jae Crowder a lot of space.  I was off the charts about Jae from his very first Celtics game, and I remember speaking out against some opinions that he is a “dime a dozen” player.  Jae’s a perfect example of my long-held theory that, once you see a player do something, it’s indisputable that he has that ability.  It then becomes a matter of putting him in the right position to do it consistently.  In Jae’s case, another hurdle is whether there’s enough floor time in a given game for him to fit in all the things he does.  His repertoire of impactful abilities is amazing.  And, given the amount of floor time Jae has been allotted lately, he seems able to demonstrate all his wares in most of his games.  King correctly identifies the fact that Jae fits much better with the bench than with the starters (where I’ve noted that he suffers from an astonishing lack of touches), and King correctly credits Brad Stevens for ferreting out that fact and acting on it.
 
• One mark of a good sports writer is being able to package negatives in such a way as to suggest they’re not as simplistic as they might seem.  King does just that in writing about the starters.  ”Effectively, they are a five-man Josh Smith.”  Now those few words speak volumes about the double-edged performance of the first unit.  My writing idol, E.B. White, the master of the concise but impactful communication, must be wearing a huge smile on his face way up there somewhere.  And King notes that, despite their “incompetent offense…to the starters' credit, they have not let games get away”.
 
• His use of statistics is very heady, though somewhat selective.  The figures he uses attest to the incremental value added by combinations including Crowder.  I say “selective” because, if he had used the +/- stat (and I’m using data from 82games.com, which is usually a couple of games behind), they would have shown only two combinations including Crowder that have plus readings:
 
√ Smart, Bradley, Crowder, Bass, Zeller:   +15 in 23.7 minutes together
 
√ Smart, Thornton, Young (yipes), Crowder, Sully: +16 in 19.9 minutes together
 
So much for a stat that credits Young with the same +16 that the group earned.
 
• In praising a very deserving Brad Stevens, King even invokes my old friend, continuity, and implies the interesting fact that, given the right mix of players, it’s possible for at least a reasonable facsimile of continuity to be achieved in as little as a month: “He has knitted a winning streak out of a starting lineup that can't score, a bench that consists mostly of other teams' scraps, and an entire roster that thinks one month together - with a whole bunch of key injuries, mind you - counts as continuity. He diagrammed a game-winning play to beat Utah, an alley-oop to go ahead of Memphis, and has revealed himself as a wizard of after-timeout sets.”
 
I realize that I can sometimes over-enthuse on things I’m passionate about.  I was once “encouraged to leave” one of the most enjoyable jobs I ever had because they felt I was “too enthusiastic.”  The only exception is the Russell Celtics, over whom it’s impossible to over-enthuse.  Everyone knows they were one of God’s perfect creations in the first 20 centuries A.D. and that Pope Red and Cardinals Russell, Jones, Havlicek, Cousy, Heinsohn, Ramsey, Sharman, Other Jones, Nelson, Sanders, and Loscutoff were placed on this earth to exemplify flawlessness.  Right, Swish?  Anyway, perhaps this article just happened to strike me the right way, and I shouldn’t be so enthusiastic about it.  But I’ve dumped so often on the works of A. and his like that it’s only fair I inject a positive note where it’s richly deserved.
 
Go Celtics!
 
Sam

sam wrote:With all due apologies to Lee Lauderdale, this might win the award for single best article of the year.  I'm going to watch Jay King, just like I determined after only a handful of games that I was going to watch Jae Crowder (who became my favorite current Celtic in those few days).  Who knows?  Maybe I'm just on a "J" kick.
 
The recent success of the Celtics has made it very difficult for scribes to find new and interesting perspectives from which to say pretty much the same thing.  King is one of the few who has really succeeded, and he has done it partly by identifying new slants and partly by adding value to a few old ones.
 
• His discussion of what I'm starting to call the "Castoff Crew" (aka the bench) is inspired— especially passages such as the following: “Regardless of who the second unit has included lately, the recipe has been the same: spread the floor with shooting bigs, hand the ball to a penetrating point guard (either Isaiah Thomas or, during his injury, Phil Pressey), and let the magic flow.  Some faces have changed, but the foundation has not. The bench scraps to defend at a reasonable level so it can downpour beautiful basketball (at least by Celtics standards) onto its foes. The small-ball offense was cute when it took down New York, intriguing when it toppled Charlotte, and later revealed itself as a consistently reliable strategy - heck, it even worked against the big, bad Memphis Grizzlies.”  That’s a beautiful turn of phrase combined with pithy perspectives.
 
• King just might have happened on the quote of the year from Avery Bradley: “We set our mind to it and started speaking it into existence.”  Was King the first to use this quote?  Would a basketball player actually wax that poetic?  Who cares?  It’s great reading and carries great meaning, and that’s what counts.
 
• King even brings my old friend, continuity, into the conversation with the interesting observation that it's possible for a workable degree of continuity to surface in as little as a month.
 
• Of course, in my book, it doesn’t hurt at all that King makes it a point to give Jae Crowder a lot of space.  I was off the charts about Jae from his very first Celtics game, and I remember speaking out against some opinions that he is a “dime a dozen” player.  Jae’s a perfect example of my long-held theory that, once you see a player do something, it’s indisputable that he has that ability.  It then becomes a matter of putting him in the right position to do it consistently.  In Jae’s case, another hurdle is whether there’s enough floor time in a given game for him to fit in all the things he does.  His repertoire of impactful abilities is amazing.  And, given the amount of floor time Jae has been allotted lately, he seems able to demonstrate all his wares in most of his games.  King correctly identifies the fact that Jae fits much better with the bench than with the starters (where I’ve noted that he suffers from an astonishing lack of touches), and King correctly credits Brad Stevens for ferreting out that fact and acting on it.
 
• One mark of a good sports writer is being able to package negatives in such a way as to suggest they’re not as simplistic as they might seem.  King does just that in writing about the starters.  ”Effectively, they are a five-man Josh Smith.”  Now those few words speak volumes about the double-edged performance of the first unit.  My writing idol, E.B. White, the master of the concise but impactful communication, must be wearing a huge smile on his face way up there somewhere.  And King notes that, despite their “incompetent offense…to the starters' credit, they have not let games get away”.
 
• His use of statistics is very heady, though somewhat selective.  The figures he uses attest to the incremental value added by combinations including Crowder.  I say “selective” because, if he had used the +/- stat (and I’m using data from 82games.com, which is usually a couple of games behind), they would have shown only two combinations including Crowder that have plus readings:
 
√ Smart, Bradley, Crowder, Bass, Zeller:   +15 in 23.7 minutes together
 
√ Smart, Thornton, Young (yipes), Crowder, Sully: +16 in 19.9 minutes together
 
So much for a stat that credits Young with the same +16 that the group earned.
 
• In praising a very deserving Brad Stevens, King even invokes my old friend, continuity, and implies the interesting fact that, given the right mix of players, it’s possible for at least a reasonable facsimile of continuity to be achieved in as little as a month: “He has knitted a winning streak out of a starting lineup that can't score, a bench that consists mostly of other teams' scraps, and an entire roster that thinks one month together - with a whole bunch of key injuries, mind you - counts as continuity. He diagrammed a game-winning play to beat Utah, an alley-oop to go ahead of Memphis, and has revealed himself as a wizard of after-timeout sets.”
 
I realize that I can sometimes over-enthuse on things I’m passionate about.  I was once “encouraged to leave” one of the most enjoyable jobs I ever had because they felt I was “too enthusiastic.”  The only exception is the Russell Celtics, over whom it’s impossible to over-enthuse.  Everyone knows they were one of God’s perfect creations in the first 20 centuries A.D. and that Pope Red and Cardinals Russell, Jones, Havlicek, Cousy, Heinsohn, Ramsey, Sharman, Other Jones, Nelson, Sanders, and Loscutoff were placed on this earth to exemplify flawlessness.  Right, Swish?  Anyway, perhaps this article just happened to strike me the right way, and I shouldn’t be so enthusiastic about it.  But I’ve dumped so often on the works of A. and his like that it’s only fair I inject a positive note where it’s richly deserved.
 
Go Celtics!
 
Sam

sam,

Russell, Jones, Havlicek, Cousy, Heinsohn, Ramsey, Sharman, Other Jones, Nelson, Sanders, Loscutoff.

One more and you'll have 12. That would make them apostles, not cardinals, and would make Red...?

I nominate Ramsey.



bob



.

Bob,

I loved Ramsey, but it wouldn't be fair to count him twice.  But I love your concept.  I'll go with Siegfried to make an even dozen.  However, I'll have to clear it with my new basketball conscience who's behind the curtain.

Sam