Celtics Aiming For Faster Pace with Jayson Tatum Out

BOSTON — The Celtics arrived at their team hotel on Thursday night to a pleasant surprise. Jayson Tatum, who remained in New York City following surgery after Game 4, greeted them in good spirits. As another game loomed to save their season, they avoided basketball talk.

“Obviously, he’s going to be stir crazy for a little,” Payton Pritchard said. “When you see one of your brothers…go through a situation like that, you just want to be there … it’s bigger than basketball now….we’ll handle that, but (we) just wanted to check on him as a friend.”

When the Celtics return to the floor on Friday, they intend to maintain the pace that powered a blowout win over the Knicks in Game 5. They only ran 91 possessions, but attempted 23 shots early in the clock (22-15 seconds), up from their average of 15.1 this postseason. They hit 13 of those 23 (56.5% FG). The Celtics fell from 19th to 29th in pace this regular season, and sunk to 15th out of 16 playoff teams between the first two rounds in the admittedly flawed pace statistic. Their slow approach became obvious during their collapses against the Knicks in Games 1 and 2.

Boston views pace as how quickly it can break into its half court possessions, with an earlier action allowing for multiple offensive layers. The Celtics attempted 24.9 shots early in the clock and 18 late during the regular season, and the latter increased to 19.2 into the playoffs despite Boston’s shot attempts dropping from 90.0 per game to 82.7. In the fourth quarters of Games 1-2, they shot 6.5 of their 22.5 attempts late in the clock, up from 5.3 in the regular season.

“It’s a lot of personnel stuff,” Pritchard said. “Pace is something we always try to strive for, but sometimes when you have certain players who are really good at matchups and ISO ball and stuff like that, you tend to go to that sometimes, but with this unit we have, we should emphasize pace and getting up the floor. We got a lot of people who like to play in the open space and stuff like that. So this group will definitely push it … Jayson is an unbelievable player, and he’s a great player that can attack isolations and matchups. When you have a stud like that, you take advantage of that. We don’t have that no more, so now we need to transition to more pace, more off-ball, more stuff like that. It doesn’t mean some of us aren’t capable of attacking, it’s just J.T. is at another level.”

This postseason, the Celtics have run 14.5 isolation possessions per game, the most in the NBA, despite posting only 0.86 points per possession, which ranked 12th out of 16 playoff teams. In transition, their 1.18 PPP is sixth out of 16 teams. Tatum ran 8.3 of those isolations at a 0.89 PPP efficiency, which was the 45th percentile in the league. Brown, who fared better at 0.98 PPP, now assumes more of that responsibility while trying to push the pace. Only six players have led more transition possessions per game than Brown’s 4.8. But his efficiency there fell off drastically, 0.98 PPP, since the regular season ended due in part to his lingering knee injury.

Wednesday’s win also saw more movement from the Celtics, split actions, rolls and cuts to the rim that counteracted a shape-shifting Knicks defense that’s gone between drops, switches and back line zones in the series while pinching the lanes. Sam Hauser’s return also helped, adding another shooter and more lineup flexibility to Boston’s attack. The Celtics need more from Pritchard, Luke Kornet and Hauser to keep their season alive on Friday. But they know New York will begin accounting for the differences they saw in the Celtics’ attack on Friday. That’s why Joe Mazzulla kept Kristaps Porziņģis’ availability in play while speaking on the radio on Thursday.

In reality, it’s hard to imagine that slower double-big lineup remaining after it posted a 101.1 offensive rating and -15.4 net rating through the start of this series as the starting unit. Jrue Holiday, Derrick White and Pritchard posted a 150.0 offensive rating on Wednesday in a rare appearance as a trio.

“It’s something they haven’t really guarded much throughout the series to this point,” Hauser said. “So I think having that wrinkle is important for us to throw something different at them when maybe we need to switch things up, or maybe playing faster leads to some of these things too. It just goes back to something they haven’t seen in a little while … we don’t have to play completely different, but we have to have something different to go to without Jayson, just because he provided so much for us on that end of the floor. So being able to do things like that where it takes pressure off Jaylen from carrying a load all night, where we can have Jrue bring the ball up, D. White bring the ball up.”