Exclusive: How Celtics Have Coached Anfernee Simons to Thrive on Defense

BOSTON — Anfernee Simons experienced a low-key arrival to his new team after the Celtics and Blazers’ officially agreed to the Jrue Holiday deal in July. No introductory press conference. No public appearances. Alongside numerous reports the Celtics could re-route him in another trade, a legitimate question emerged over whether he’d actually play in Boston.

Yet Simons got to work at Auerbach Center immediately, appearing there in early July and becoming the easiest player to pair with an assistant coach. Ross McMains, who’s spent the last two years on Joe Mazzulla’s staff after starting with Maine, worked out with Simons in 2020 while helping at Bill Duffy’s agency between his Melbourne United job in Australia and a stint with the Louisville Cardinals. Simons, then, was a 20-year-old only beginning his career alongside veterans Damian Lillard, CJ McCollum and Carmelo Anthony in Portland.

“I was unemployed in Santa Barbara and doing training and he spent a whole summer out in Santa Barbara where we worked together,” McMains told CLNS Media. “He was coming off the bench for Portland … so I mean, he’s gone from being a 7-8 point per game scorer to a 20 point game scorer in that time. He was young, he was really young coming into the league. He was really young then, and he’s grown up. He’s a grown man. He’s a professional now, absolute pro and has established himself in this league with some real strengths, and I think the next part is coming here, understanding the standards that we have here and the expectations. I think he’s really excited to take on that challenge.”

Joe Mazzulla made those clear upon arrival, approaching the now 26-year-old about his defense and challenging him to improve. Simons even indicated that he may not play as much as he would like if he doesn’t progress on that end, and partially blamed his struggles in Portland on effort. Acceptance that he and McMains used to begin every workout, beginning with film and translating it into on-court workouts that test his ability to think defense. McMains became Jayson Tatum’s primary assistant coach last year, and prepared him to face every defensive coverage imaginable. Now, he needed to drill playing in each one to Simons.

“Joe always talks about like playing fast, thinking fast and we require that at a really high level,” McMains said. “Being able to move from one coverage to the next, it’s a very high standard.”

The Celtics hope that constant engagement, a defensive environment and utilizing his length and speed will yield better results while utilizing Simons’ speed on offense as part of their high-paced attack they’ve teased throughout camp. The Blazers once viewed him as a core piece, enough to sign him to the four-year, $100 million contract he’s finishing now. He just led the team in scoring this past season. Yet his defensive inconsistency changed that, and they passed up on the chance to retain him long-term to acquire a 35-year-old in his place. Mazzulla, while jabbing him about his struggles, also assured Simons that he’s not as bad as the perception around him stated.

“First, be yourself and give us every bit of your strengths that we have,” McMains stressed to Simons. “You can fill it up as a scorer. You can fill it up as a distributor, and then also building his defensive identity and a lot of that’s within him, and this environment is going to bring that out of him and he’s attacked it from day one in terms of his defensive mentality.”

Simons said he worked on swiping at the ball, jumping passing lanes and becoming a defensive playmaker upon arrival for four weeks, and did defensive drills he never had before in his career. He saw the biggest difference in his awareness now that the team is practicing and scrimmaging together. On the first day, he went against Derrick White and Payton Pritchard with the second unit, but Boston has mixed lineups, according to their social media posts from the first week of training camp. While the Celtics plan to ramp up their defensive aggressiveness to force more turnovers and take advantage of their new personnel, they want to maintain many of the building blocks of a unit that ranked in the top-six in seven of the last eight seasons.

Under Mazzulla, they’ve stressed thinking, communicating things they see on that end and adjusting on the fly. That made Jrue Holiday, Al Horford, Luke Kornet and Kristaps Porziņģis defensiev fixtures as they could switch between different coverages almost possession-by-possession while guarding multiple positions. The Celtics are going to try to keep that unpredictability as part of their approach. And they see Simons’ awareness and IQ fitting into how their defense, along with his 6-9 wingspan and quick hands. It’s an adjustment, however, from a Portland system that McMains observed as significantly different. Especially in the language they use.

“Every team has a different defensive system and so he’s learning our language, he’s learning our coverages,” he said. “He’s just learning how we do different things here. So that’s first is just learn the system and then number two is now actually develop your ability to do those things at a high level. So it’s learning the system and then it’s also, can he improve his ability to guard on the ball with different different techniques? Can he improve his ability navigating screens with different techniques?”

“He’s coming into this situation right here where the standards are really high. We’re fortunate enough to have had the last few years that we’ve had and stuff and the group of guys we had here, and so I just think that environment speaks to what you have to be and what you have to do before you even step on the floor and I think that’s going to bring the best out of him in that regard, let alone him actually working to improve in that area. So yeah, I think the effort and the application is the baseline, but then on top of that, now it’s applying his IQ to it, applying his learning of our system to it and continue to improve in those different areas.”

The Celtics need him to clear that defensive threshold so he can contribute his nearly unmatched offensive skills to a roster missing Tatum (26.8 PPG) and 45.6 additional points per game missing from departing rotation players. Simons contributed 20.7 PPG to the Blazers over the past three seasons, shooting 37.4% on 8.8 three-point attempts per game, which should translate comfortably to a Celtics team that led the league in three-point tries last year.

Boston will also tap into his play-making, 4.8 assists with only 2.0 turnovers per game last year, while using him around various types of screens on and off the ball to create advantages. Simons reflected that he absorbed the bulk of defensive pressure that teams threw at Portland since the team traded Lillard. Now, he expects to play off what opponents throw at Jaylen Brown and others. Without starting roles decided, the Celtics want Simons to lean on White, Pritchard, Brown and the team’s former championship core, the battles they’ve experienced and the chemistry they’ve formed on both ends. They already see him quietly doing that, showing a willingness to grow and adjust. It’s not about fitting in, but allowing himself to play enough quality minutes to fully be himself.

“He’s been great just leading our pace in terms of being a leader in the back court,” McMains said. “Getting our speed going. But he has a natural ability obviously to score the ball and play-make for us. Thankfully, from when I last worked with him, he was guy coming off the bench who purely was like come in, ball touches your hands, for the most part, let it fly.”

“He wasn’t in any advantage creation situations, and it’s been three years of getting to rep ball screens, come off in-bounds, come off hand-offs and create the advantage for this group, and so the work that he’s had at just reading the game and reading coverages and being able to create an advantage, one for himself but also for others … he doesn’t view every possession in a vacuum. He has a very good understanding of if I’m playing one possession this way, it impacts the following possession and his communication through that progression is really good.”