The Boston Celtics have been praised all season long for their offensive prowess, spearheaded by the likes of Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown, along with their solid supporting cast. But if you ask ESPN’s Tim Legler, that style led directly to the New York Knicks overcoming a huge deficit to defeat the Celtics on Game 1 of their playoff series.
Legler was known to be an incredibly efficient shooter over the course of his ten-year NBA career. But even he knows that sometimes, chucking up threes early in the shot clock with a big lead, perhaps, isn’t the best offensive strategy.
The Celtics found this out the hard way on Monday night, shooting just 25% from the three-point line, missing a postseason record 45 three-point attempts en route to a 108-105 overtime loss.
On Tuesday’s edition of Legler’s ALL NBA Podcast with co-host Adam Mares, Legler spoke candidly about the Celtics’ Game 1 loss, calling the Celtics’ strategy an “insult to basketball” and an “abomination.”
“Listen, man, what the Boston Celtics did last night was an insult to basketball, in my opinion, man,” said Legler. “That’s an abomination, an abomination offensively to play the way they played. And look, people are going to sit there, ‘Well, that’s how they play all the time, man. Live by the three, die by the three.’ What are you talking about? Watch the game. I don’t care how many they listed. First of all, I know this for a fact, because I’ve dived into this. The way the league or statisticians, or people at the game that are doing the stats, label contested, uncontested shots, I’ve got a massive disagreement about.
I’ve already looked at it in Second Spectrum because you pull up information, and you’re like, ‘Wait a second, that’s not an uncontested shot.’ Whatever. So there’s a big number of uncontested shots, and that’s what the Celtics contingent and people that love the Celtics or that defend the Celtics are going to say today, ‘Well, they’re all uncontested threes.’ My ass. I watched, I wrote them all down. They were not. Here’s the thing, too. There’s a difference between what you might even think is an uncontested shot and a rushed shot. You can still have an uncontested shot that’s rushed. What I didn’t understand was why were the Celtics playing… For literally an entire 18-minute stretch, they played offense like there was three seconds left in the game. Every guy that caught the ball.
“That’s what I was trying to figure out. What the hell is the hurry? And guess what? It wasn’t just Tatum, although, man, was he bad last night. You can’t play that way offensively while this lead’s slipping away without figuring out a way to get to a mid-range jumper, a something at the rim, or free throws. It’s embarrassing. But it’s not just him. I actually have a bigger problem, Adam, with Al Horford and Jrue Holiday. In particular, those two guys. Who the hell do they think they are? Klay Thompson shooting balls? The ball’s coming to him in a corner off with 19 seconds on the shot clock, and a guy draped all over them, and they’re letting it fly with no offensive rebound positioning at all? Are you kidding me?”
In the four-minute rant, Legler would acknowledge that the Knicks’ defense also deserved credit for their 20-point second-half comeback. But ultimately, he believes that the Celtics gave the Knicks the recipe they needed for a comeback.
On one hand, Legler’s argument here is a valid one. We have seen countless teams in recent years with a three-point-centric offense struggle to replicate that success in the postseason.
But then again, it is truly hard to argue with Joe Mazzulla’s offensive strategy based on one game. Especially considering the same strategy led to the Celtics winning an NBA championship just last season.
Regardless of what Tim Legler thinks, don’t expect this volume of three-point attempts to stop anytime soon anytime soon given the fact that the team set a franchise record for the number of threes taken in a regular season this year. And it that does mean that the Celtics won’t get past the Knicks in the second round, Joe Mazzula will likely live with that.