How the Celtics Are Winning

But that was never going to be the plan if the coach could help it. Mazzulla, after all, is one of the most overcompetitive men in sports, which is saying something. He embraces suffering. He starts every day with an ice bath and ends it in his chapel. He hiked through the Costa Rican jungle in bare feet. After winning the championship last year, he told reporters, “People are gonna say the target is on our back, but I hope it’s right on our forehead in between our eyes.” During training camp this past fall, at the annual media pickup game, he had the media play the coaching staff—and then instructed those coaches, which included former N.B.A. and N.C.A.A. Division I players, to run a full-court press on defense. The coaches won 57–4. (The game was just twelve minutes long.) Mazzulla fist-pumped after the final basket. That man? Tank? We all should have known.

The Celtics started the season src–3, then muddled their way to 5–7, which was more or less where many people thought they’d be. They won some quality games, lost some games they might have won, shot a lot of threes, and couldn’t rebound to save their lives. Brown was great, but White and Pritchard, the other main holdovers from the championship team, struggled badly, and sometimes pressed and panicked as the clock ran down and the shots didn’t fall.

The turnaround was sudden: after a tough loss by two to the Philadelphia 76ers, the Celtics blew out the Memphis Grizzlies the next night, 131–95. And for two weeks after that they had the No. 1 offense in the league. What happened?

The simplest answer centers on Brown. Most of the offense centers on him, too, and he’s been spectacular. Great players can make up for a lot of team-wide weaknesses. Brown is constantly attacking and making sharp reads of the situation; he runs pick-and-rolls now with ease. His main job is to score, and he’s doing it from everywhere—including taking more deep two-point shots than anyone, shots that have fallen out of favor lately for their analytical profile (almost as hard to hit as threes, but worth fifty per cent fewer points). They’re working for him—and for the team, opening driving lanes, causing defenders to hesitate. He’s averaging nearly thirty points a night, and is not only more involved in possessions but also scoring more efficiently—a rare combination.

Another answer is that White and Pritchard are good players, and even good players have cold streaks; eventually, the cold streaks end. The Celtics’ fortunes have changed as those two have recovered their form. Yet another answer emphasizes the team’s adaptability: a lot of players are getting minutes, and all of them are treating those minutes as valuable. Talent wins in the N.B.A., but solid execution on basic fundamentals can go a long way toward upending the established order. (Then there’s the Oklahoma City Thunder, who have only one loss so far this season, and are an order all their own.) Brown has perfect footwork. Queta is a wall. Everyone sets screens and cuts hard. The team watched a lot of film to fix its rebounding problem, and upped the effort: when you’re smaller, coaches stressed, it helps to hit first and hit hard.

That could describe the team’s over-all approach. Last season, and for a while before that, the Celtics rode a kind of algorithmic process to the top, involving shooting a lot of threes—so many threes that the strategy became known as Mazzulla Ball. And the players taking those shots, particularly Tatum and the seven-foot-two-inch Porzingis, were so smooth that the style could seem a little bloodless. That’s not true anymore. The shotmaking now feels less actuarial than psychologically motivated. The Celtics still are near the top of the league in three-point attempts, but they’re not playing the kind of seamless, positionless basketball that modern teams favor. Every single player appears to have something to prove, and everybody knows their job. The basic instructions are clear enough: don’t turn the ball over, ever; hustle to collect missed shots; knock their balls loose; take open looks. Do absolutely everything you can to help the team score.

Can the team’s success last? Maybe not. On Thursday, playing the Milwaukee Bucks—who had been in freefall, and were without their star, Giannis Antetokounmpo—the Celtics coasted to an early advantage. Walsh hit all seven of his shots in the first half, for eighteen points, to go with three rebounds and three steals. Then, in the second half, the Celtics lost aim. There was an almost slapstick quality to ball after ball being heaved up, over and over, clanging against the rim or missing it altogether. Collectively, the team missed sixteen consecutive three-point attempts.