You know that feeling when you get really excited to eat a burrito and then get disappointed when the burrito falls apart because it wasn’t wrapped properly? That’s the best comparison I could come up with to describe the Celtics season so far. The Boston Celtics have stumbled out of the gate to start the 2018-2019 NBA season. Last season this team finished a game away from making the NBA finals without All-Stars Kyrie Irving and Gordon Hayward. During the 2018 playoff run, Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown were the two leading scorers for the Celtics. Between the combination of Irving and Hayward back from injuries and Tatum and Brown continuing their ascension as young stars, this team was supposed to be very deep and have a good season. This team had the second highest preseason over/under win total behind only the Golden State Warriors. The expectations headed into this season were extremely high.
So far, the Celtics haven’t come remotely close to reaching those expectations. Last year they had a great start to the season where they won 16 straight games after losing their first two. This year it has been the opposite. Boston has started the year 7-6. They recently completed a road trip where they went 1-4, and probably should’ve gone 0-5 had it not been for Kyrie Irving’s late game heroics against Phoenix. While they have the league’s number one defensive rating, they rank 26th in offensive rating ahead of only the Suns, Hawks, Magic, and Bulls.
So what is wrong with the Celtics? The only way to explain this garbage offensive rating is that someone has to be playing bad. Kyrie had a slow start to the season, but once he ditched his headband and got a haircut, he started playing like an All-Star again. Tatum and Brown have seen their scoring numbers dip compared to what they were putting up in the playoffs last year. Tatum has been settling for too many midrange jump shots that have led to more Kobe Bryant comparisons than I would like. Jaylen Brown’s scoring numbers have dipped from 18 points in the playoffs last year to 11.3 points a contest through the first 13 games of this season. The Celtics need more offense from the players they spent consecutive number three picks on. After being the starting point guard on a team that was a win away from the NBA finals a little less than six months ago, Terry Rozier has seen his role diminish this season. He could be the starting point guard on a handful of NBA teams, but on the Celtics, he is a backup in a contract year that will almost certainly not get a new deal from the Celtics after they decided to pay Marcus Smart. It’s hard to imagine a player being happy in that situation, and he certainly hasn’t been coming off the bench playing like the ‘Scary Terry’ who was showing up to playoff games in a Drew Bledsoe jersey. Unlike Bledsoe, the number 11 on the Celtics will not be losing his starting job to the player who wears number 12. Unfortunately, for Rozier this means he won’t have the opportunity to play in a starting role this season, and if he is one of those players who needs to be in a starting role or needs more minutes to play like he did in the playoffs last season the Celtics should trade him.
Gordon Hayward has been the main problem. He’s averaging 9.9 points on 9.3 shots. He hasn’t been the same player he was before his injury, and he definitely hasn’t been the shooter and playmaker fans were expecting when the Celtics signed him to the max contract in 2017. He also does not have much experience playing with the players on the Celtics since his season was over in five minutes last year. Returning to normal after a gruesome injury like the one he suffered and learning how to play with new teammates will take some time. However, during that time, it would be better for the Celtics to have him come off the bench and ease in by playing against second stringers as opposed to starting. With this change, the Celtics could start either Marcus Morris, who has been a pleasant surprise on offense this season, or they could start Aron Baynes and use the same starting five that they used for most of the 2018 season. Either way a lineup change seems imminent. This team can’t keep trotting out the same starting five that struggles offensively and falls behind in the first quarter.
It’s only November, so nobody should be overreacting to what has unfolded in the NBA thus far. With that being said, the Celtics haven’t been meeting expectations this season. Brad Stevens has overachieved during his first five seasons in the league with a lack of talent on his team, but now he has a plethora of talent on the roster that he needs to be able to make work. There could be a trade for the Celtics to slightly tweak the roster, but the blockbuster Anthony Davis trade won’t be happening during the regular season. The east is not the joke of a conference that many imagined it to be as Giannis is leading the field for MVP, the Raptors are the top seed, and Philadelphia just added Jimmy Butler to their young core. The conference that Boston was supposedly going to dominate isn’t looking like a cakewalk anymore. The Celtics need to fix their offensive woes or else this can get ugly faster than it takes Dom Toretto to complete a quarter mile.