The Celtics Offense Looks Stuck

After just three games in the 2021 NBA season, I have noticed that the Celtics offense looks stuck.  Despite their lucky win against the Bucks, the Celtics have looked terrible!  They got absolutely destroyed by Brooklyn and played a very down game against the Pacers.

For starters, Brad Stevens can’t play two centers.  As much as I love Theis and Thompson, they both can’t be on the floor together.  We saw why against Brooklyn.  One of them was on Durant and he could do literally whatever he wanted, and he did.  It worked against the Bucks because Giannis can’t shoot but you can’t do this against like Brooklyn or the Lakers.

Second, despite Kemba’s struggles last year, we need him to be an elite top tier team!  He makes everything flow and is a huge offensive option.  But third and maybe the most important is the play calling/Tatum at the end of the game.

It’s no surprise that Tatum is my favorite player.  But his late game shot selection is terrible.  Maybe it’s Brad calling plays for him to do an iso option or maybe Brad isn’t calling a play and is trusting his best player to make a move.  But at the end of the day he is still only 22.  Still no excuse for the ESPN number 11 player in the game!

His shot against the Bucks was a prayer.  He hit a part of the box that if you ran that 100 times it misses 99 of them.  It just so happens that Tatum hit that 1 time.  But that was a bad shot.  Next about Tatum is that he can’t hit a layup.  If you watched that Bucks and Nets game, he was getting to the rim and just not hitting layups.  Honestly not sure how that is possible but it is clearly getting into his head because he is refusing to drive late in game.

Outside of Tatum, Brad Stevens has got to be better calling plays that aren’t Tatum or Brown shooting.  Both these guys are averaging over 25 a game but the next guy is Teague with only 9.3… yikes.  Granted, we are only three games into the year but these are bad habits that you want to eliminate sooner rather than later.  If teams know that either Tatum or Brown are going to score then game planning is going to be a joke.  Hopefully when Kemba comes back these issues will work themselves out, but until he does we need to get everyone involved.  We can’t just wait for Kemba to come back or else we might be too far into a hole to climb back out.

-John (uncle_mac4)