Celtics Playoff Preview
This season has been filled with up and downs, but we've finally made it. Now after all the adversity, injuries, and winning a hard-fought play-in game against the Wizards, our reward is the Brooklyn Nets. The same Brooklyn Nets who have three future Hall of Famers, all of which still look like they are in their respective primes. The Celtics are down their 2nd best player in Jaylen Brown, and potentially down their best big man in Robert Williams. None of this bodes well for the Celtics' chances in this series, but we can still look ahead to what this series may bring.
Defensive Matchups:
The Celtics do not matchup well with the Nets one bit. We do have Tatum that can provide solid defense on Durant, and Marcus Smart has shown in the past he's about as good as it gets when guarding Harden. I'm not too concerned about our matchups against Joe Harris and whomever is playing center for the Nets, not to say Harris can't kill us with his shooting, but because he'll do most of his damage off-ball as a result of ball movement and the superstars around him. Lastly, we have Kemba on Kyrie. This is clearly going to be the matchup they attack the most often, I think in general they will try to pick on Kemba a lot. I think Nesmith is going to have his handful in situations having to guard Kyrie in minutes while he and Smart share the floor. It also hurts we can't try to mask this weakness with a guy who can help protect the paint like Rob.
Offensive Matchups:
I expect the Nets to go small for a lot of this series so that they are very switchable, they don't have a guy you can pick on because they have pretty good size and athleticism at most spots. Just having these bigger bodies can really hide some of their weaknesses defensively. You would hope that with a team going small that our big man could take advantage of that, if we had Rob fully healthy I would agree that we could. As we continue to get updates that Rob is still not 100% it looks like we're going to see a whole lot of Tristan Thompson. Thompson attacking Jeff Green, Nick Claxton, or Blake Griffin is exactly what Brooklyn wants. Thompson ranks in the bottom 20th percentile in points per shot attempt, and Thompson ranks in the bottom 9th percentile among bigs at the rim. So clearly the plan of attack should not be through Tristan Thompson.
Previous Meetings:
They lost the first matchup against the Nets on Christmas by a score of 123-95, and this was clearly prior to the acquisition of James Harden, but also prior to Kemba Walker returning. They played again in mid-March and the Nets once again won, this time by a score of 121 to 109, this time without Kevin Durant playing. The Nets completed the season sweep on April 23rd 109 to 104. This game the Nets were without Durant and Harden, while Kemba and Jaylen didn't play for the Celtics.
One Last Thing:
In the playoffs last season Tatum played 12% of his minutes at center, I think him logging a lot of minutes at center gives us the best chance to be competitive in this series. We don't have a great rim protector anyways as it currently stands and the Nets excel with the lineup of Kyrie, Harden, Harris, KD, and Green, so much so that they are +26.5 points per 100 possessions. They can easily run this lineup and not get punished with any of the Celtics centers, so why not run a lineup with more shooting and more perimeter defenders to guard their big 3.
