Celtics basketball, how we’ve missed you. It’s been a long, strange offseason, so it feels good to turn the page and learn about a new team and, maybe more fittingly, a new era.
I love preseason because it’s the first real look at where the coaching staff’s heads are at, and who is standing out in training camp. It’s also a tryout for some to show growth or earn their spot.
You can usually get a feel for who’s going to be important, but it’s worth taking things with a grain of salt. Last preseason,
Chris Boucher started all four games, then appeared in only nine regular season games before being traded. Xavier Tillman had a similar fate.
So with a dash of skepticism and a loose promise not to overreact, there’s still a lot to learn as the Celtics visit the Cavaliers for game one of the preseason.
Who gets the start?
This is one of the more interesting big-picture questions of the season.
Joe Mazzulla recently said three or four starters are etched in stone. That’s slightly cryptic, but we can confidently assume Derrick White, Paul George and Jayson Tatum are the obvious three.
My anticipated starting unit has Payton Pritchard and Neemias Queta rounding out the five. But if only four are locked in, there are two ways to read it. One is that Pritchard is the fourth, and center becomes a matchup call between Queta and Mitchell Robinson. The other is that the center spot is settled, and they value Pritchard more in his bench role.
This game against Cleveland could reveal who that fourth starter is, and it may also tell us what they’re searching for in the fifth spot.
Are they targeting spot-up shooting, defensive activity, playmaking? Even if the answer isn’t permanent, we’ll see who gets the first crack at it, and what type of skills they want to round out the group.
A leap in the wing room?
On a similar note, a breakout from one of the Celtics’ wings could help the lineup take shape.
There is a lot of room in the rotation for change. As we saw last season, Baylor Scheierman, Jordan Walsh and Hugo Gonzalez were interchangeable. All of them had stretches as a starter or key rotation piece. This year could bring more of the same, but maybe someone breaks through.
Walsh could fulfill his goal of developing into a more versatile offensive player. He spoke at Summer League about wanting to be the answer in any situation, rather than someone who gets subbed out when the team needs a bucket.
Scheierman might carry a strong training camp into the preseason. His blend of shotmaking and ball handling makes him arguably the most natural offensive fit of the three next to their best players.
A sophomore leap from Gonzalez isn’t out of the question either. Between Summer League and the FIBA World Cup Qualifiers, he’s had the most real game experience of the group over the last few months.
Which of the three do we see first, and does anyone separate from the others? One of them could even start. If it’s not Pritchard in the first five, any of them makes sense.
Breaking through means getting past Sam Hauser, though. He was counted on more consistently than all three last season and held the fifth starter spot in the playoffs. I’ll be interested to see if that remains the case, or if one of them manages to leapfrog him on the depth chart.
Does the defense feel any different?
Something I wrote about this summer was that the Celtics’ strong defensive rating last season was built more on managing their opponents’ shot profile than on forcing turnovers.
They finished fourth in defensive rating while ranking 29th in opponent turnovers. That’s something to feel good about. They were already elite without forcing turnovers, so closing that gap could push them toward the best defense in the league.
They have the personnel to make takeaways a priority, and the additions of George and Robinson should only help.
What I’m looking for is whether the defense feels different. Do they let their bigs swap some drop coverage for switches or blitzes in the pick and roll? Will we see aggressive nail help and activity in the passing lanes from Tatum and George? Are Gonzalez and Walsh unleashed as point-of-attack defenders, tasked with creating chaos?
Turnover numbers will tell some of the story, but you can see the signs of an aggressive defense forming quickly. With Robinson and Queta (and Derrick White), they have protection on the back line that should allow them to take calculated risks. Additional influence over the possession battle would make them even more dangerous, since they’re typically very good at limiting their own turnovers.
Cleveland is a good first test, giving us some real tape on how they handle two strong creators in James Harden and Donovan Mitchell.
