Jordan Walsh Should Start Again for Celtics After Pacers Loss

Baylor Scheierman became the latest Celtics spot starter on Monday at Indiana with Jaylen Brown (back) out and Sam Hauser returning from a one game absence with hamstring tightness. They combined to finish 2-for-10 from the field (2-9 3PT) and the Celtics lost both of their minutes in a 98-96 loss to the Pacers, while winning Derrick White and Payton Pritchard’s playing time by one point.

Jordan Walsh remained in a bench role for the sixth straight game where the Celtics have played .500 basketball, assuming 18:11 second half minutes to Scheierman’s 3:42. Walsh made all three shots he attempted inside the arc after halftime, recorded two of his three steals in the game and helped cut a six point deficit with six minutes remaining the fourth to two points with a pair of stops, breakout dunk and assist to Pritchard for a three.

Walsh has now appeared in 18.8 minutes per game from the second unit, averaging 4.2 points and 5.2 rebounds per game alongside 0.7 steals. He’s shooting 10-for-22 from the field and 4-for-10 from three across that stretch even after he missed both attempts from deep on Monday. In 20 games as a starter, he posted 7.8 PPG, 4.9 RPG and 1.1 SPG on 60.4% FG (44.7% 3PT) while Boston won 15 of those games and Walsh’s defense emerged as the revelation of the season.

Yet it wasn’t his own poor performance or another player’s ascension internally that led to Walsh’s demotion. An illness knocked him out of last month’s win at Toronto and he missed the following game against the Pacers. Hugo González played well across that stretch, and Walsh started four more games, but his second half minutes dwindled across each before Hauser replaced him after halftime in Sacramento, then assumed Walsh’s role in the following game. González started the San Antonio game with Hauser out, Joe Mazzulla said, to match Walsh up with Victor Wembanyama off the bench.

“In the second half they went to more cross-matching,” Mazzulla said on Saturday. “So we just went to different lineups from there. I thought Jordan did a great job on Wembanyama. Once they went to their cross-matches, we have to be able to space the floor and make the two-on-one reads. I thought Baylor did a good job of that.”

Walsh held Wembanyama to 2-for-4 shooting and four points across 3:24 matched up against him, according to NBA tracking data. In his first game off the bench in LA, he continued slowing James Harden and held Kawhi Leonard to 1-for-5 shooting after Leonard emerged as an All-Star candidate in the weeks prior. That night, Walsh posted 13 points and 13 rebounds across 29:38, actually seeing more playing time in his move to the bench.

But the Celtics lost part of their identity with the move. The Walsh starting group posted a 118 offensive rating, 114 defensive rating and +4.2 net rating through 21 appearances. The Hauser lineup is +23.4 for the season, +19.3 over the last four games, and he found his shot (19-42 3PT, 45.2%) across that stretch while receiving praise from Mazzulla for his defense. But Walsh maintains the team’s best individual offensive rating this season (122.7) due in part to the power of playing with the starters.

Walsh’s offensive rebounding rate beats Hauser’s by nearly five percentage points. His effective shooting is 10 percentage point better for the season. Walsh’s 2.5 STL% also far exceeds Hauser’s 1.3% on a team that wants to force turnovers. Boston has forced the fewest turnovers per game (9.8) since moving Walsh to the bench. They ranked 24th with 13.3 in 21 games with their previous rotation.

“I thought (Walsh) was tremendous,” Mazzulla said in LA after Hauser became a starter. “He didn’t move to the bench. We went with Sam because we knew what their lineups were gonna be, we wanted to get off to a great start on the offensive end. We knew what their coverages were. We got off to a quick start with some of their off-ball movements and it changed their matchups because we went with him, and I think that’s a testament to the guys that we’re always gonna do what gives us the best chance to win and everyone has embraced that. So for him to understand that … to even give us the production that he did, that just shows the mindset of the team.”

Walsh took Mazzulla’s benching as a personal challenge and looked more like himself at Indiana. There’s no reason he shouldn’t produce a similar impact with the second unit that he did with the start, and can always ride that into the closing unit as he did on Monday. Even after going away from him in second halves while he started, Mazzulla acknowledged his importance to the team. Scheierman rode a 10-point performance and strong closing stretch against San Antonio to a start on Monday, reflective of Mazzulla’s merit-based rotation approach this year.

There’s still some debate over what matters most this season, though. The Celtics seemed to find and develop something with the Walsh group, which stood among the league’s more balanced five-man lineups at its height (+8.5 for 12 games). Could that impact persist through Jayson Tatum’s return and become a factor next season? Boston needs to find those things out this year as much as they should continue along what’s become a sustainable path to contending in the East now.

“(Mazzulla) was challenging me to come in and try to be the guy that I was for a month,” Walsh said. “I definitely took that on as a challenge, but at the same time to me, starting, bench, it don’t matter. If I have a chance to come in and make an impact, that’s all that matters to me.”