Good place to start, Brad
Latest quintet a winning blend
November has a couple of days left, but it’s not too soon to anoint a Buzzkill of the Month winner. It goes to popular sixth-year Celtics coach Brad Stevens. He clinched it with 10 words spoken after his team slayed the Pelicans’ five-game homecourt winning streak Monday night.
“We won’t be settled on a starting lineup (pause) ’til forever,” Stevens said. Say what? Surprising words, to say the least, in the wake of a game that from the opening tip looked more like the end of a search for the right combination than a continuation of it. The Celtics hammered the Pelicans, 124-107, on the strength of a 34-21 first quarter blitz.
If it had been at the Garden and Stevens had grabbed the microphone to make that announcement to the crowd, 19,580 lighters would have sparked, demanding an encore. A great show can’t just end after two hours and change. You can’t let Nickelback take the stage in place of a Neil Young encore and expect the crowd to say, “Oh well, they’re both Canadian performers, so that’ll do just fine.”
The five starters Stevens sent onto the Smoothie King Center floor made for one special blend. With Jaylen Brown sidelined by a tailbone injury and searching, retooling Gordon Hayward coming off the bench, Stevens went with Kyrie Irving, Marcus Smart, Jayson Tatum, Marcus Morris Sr. and Al Horford.
The Pelicans, big birds flying across the sky in most home games, looked helpless when confronted with the infusion of Marcuses into the Celtics’ starting lineup.
For one thing, Smart and Morris increase the junkyard-dog component of the starting lineup. They enjoy mixing it up.
Smart has talked multiple times about opposing teams looking too comfortable playing against the Celtics. With Smart and Morris on the floor, the Pelicans looked anything but at ease. Whether he’s pressuring the ball or blocking a much taller man’s shot at the rim, Smart doesn’t abide comfort.
Morris has started 49.4 percent of his 490 NBA games, which is about right for the type of player he has been for most of his career. But he’s better than that player now. He’s posting career-best numbers in several categories: field-goal percentage (48.8), 3-point percentage (43.2), free throw percentage (85.0) and rebounds (6.7), and he’s doing it with his fewest minutes per game (26.4) in the past four seasons.
Let Morris hear his name called every night and his already growing confidence is liable to explode. Think about his game. What is it that he doesn’t do well? He defends, shoots well from long distance, can score inside despite lacking typical NBA jumping ability, and he leads the team in rebounding.
Morris bookended the break between the third and fourth quarters with a pair of crafty plays. First, he set up Aron Baynes with an interior pass delivered behind the back for a shot that spun off the rim. Morris was right there for the follow-up bucket. Then Morris found himself isolated with the ball on the right baseline. He took a couple of dribbles, put up a mid-range jumper and slithered his way into position to put his own miss back up and in for an easy two on his way to a 19-point, 11-rebound night in his third start of the season.
It’s a versatile lineup that can present matchup problems for opposing defenses of any size. It’s a fast lineup that also features four of the team’s top five 3-point-percentage shooters among rotation players: Morris, Tatum (40.7), Irving (37.9) and Horford (34.6). That spaces the floor to create driving lanes for Irving and Tatum.
Any time you make 15-of30 3-pointers, as the starters did Monday, that makes everything look better. But far more than that was in play. It just looked like such a natural blend, one surely capable of getting the Celtics off the .500 treadmill on which they have spent much of November.