Celtics blow out Lakers for fourth straight win: 8 takeaways

Boston Celtics

The Celtics are a flawed roster from a construction standpoint, but there’s nothing particularly confusing about why they are winning games.

Jaylen Brown and the Celtics demolished a shorthanded version of their greatest rivals, claiming a 126-105 victory over the Lakers on Friday.

Here are the takeaways.

The Celtics are good.

We would be remiss if we didn’t acknowledge at the outset who wasn’t in Boston on Friday: Luka Doncic, who was in Slovenia to be present for the birth of his second child. We also need to note that when LeBron James scored on Friday, he was cheered sarcastically, because it was the younger Bronny edition, not his more famous (and, in Boston, more hated) father who spent one of his last—perhaps his actual last—trip to Boston as a player on the bench in street clothes.

But the Celtics made sure that Friday’s game was not about the Lakers right from the opening tip. The signs have been there for weeks for anyone paying attention, but any national fan of the NBA tuning in to a massive rivalry game on a Friday night saw the Celtics put together their fifth wire-to-wire win of the season, with just a small blip of a Lakers run in the third and fourth quarters that briefly made the game more interesting.

The Celtics made the announcement to the wider basketball world that they truly are a good team. Not “good for a team missing Jayson Tatum,” but good, full stop.

How good they are is still unclear at this stage. Six of the Celtics’ last seven games have been against teams with winning records, and they are 6-1 in that stretch, but their wins over the Lakers and Magic come with asterisks due to injury issues.

But the wins over the Pistons and Knicks were as real as they get. The Celtics are a flawed roster from a construction standpoint, but there’s nothing particularly confusing about why they are winning games: They have a lot of good players, they are well-coached, they are shooting well, and the good players have learned how to mitigate their weak points and play together well.

Much tougher tests lie ahead than a back-to-back against one of the worst Wizards teams in recent memory (which is saying a lot!) followed by a Lakers team missing Doncic and James, but the thing about easy tests is you still have to pass them, and the Celtics passed Friday’s with a flourish.

Jaylen Brown is embracing the ‘boring’ work.

Brown wasn’t as brilliant on Friday as he was in his last outing—the Celtics’ victory over the Knicks at TD Garden on Tuesday—but he still led the team in scoring with yet another 30-point outing to go with eight rebounds and eight assists. His usage is third-highest in the NBA at 36.6, according to Cleaning the Glass, and he is assisting on 23.9 percent of his team’s shots, which is in the 98th percentile league-wide.

The quality of the passing is going up too. With 9:04 left in the third, Brown dribbled around a screen from Neemias Queta at the top of the key to his right, went behind his back to cut back to the left, saw Austin Reaves leave Jordan Walsh in the corner and whirled to pass to a wide-open Walsh, then did the rare Steph Curry turnaway as a passer as Walsh took his time and canned the triple.

A 30-point game should never be sniffed at, but Brown’s excellence is starting to become normal.

“I think the expectation level has always been the same in my brain,” he said afterward. “Just come out and compete and maximize our potential and kind of go from there. Don’t focus on the end result. Focus on what you control, that’s in front of you. That’s winning each possession, being the harder playing team, all that good stuff.

“It sounds boring, but that’s the type of stuff that leads to building a really good team.”

Brown has yet to miss the playoffs in his nine-year NBA career. If anyone would know what leads to building a really good team, it’s him.

The Celtics made a ton of 3-pointers.

This season, the Celtics have been a lot better (and have taken a lot more shots) from mid-range than they did in previous seasons under Joe Mazzulla, which is largely a product of Brown’s All-NBA caliber scoring.

Friday’s game, however, was a throwback to last year: The Celtics made 24 3-pointers total on 45 attempts, good for 53.3 percent. The Lakers were solid as well, 14-for-35 (40 percent), but an advantage of 10 made 3-pointers is a death knell in the NBA.

Jordan Walsh had yet another great game.

At some point, we will need to stop remarking on Walsh having good games just because he had them, but today isn’t that day.

Walsh, who went 8-for-8 from the floor against the Wizards on Thursday, continued his hot shooting, finishing 6-for-7 from the floor and 4-for-5 from three with 17 points. He made his first triple and powered in an incredibly difficult and-one before he finally missed his first shot in more than 24 hours, and early in the fourth quarter, he hit a sneaky big triple as the shot clock expired with the Celtics leading by 15 after the Lakers made a mildly threatening overture at the Celtics’ massive lead.

The defensive end, however, was where Walsh really excelled once again. He made everything difficult for Austin Reaves in the first half—the lone Lakers star who dressed for Friday’s game—by flying all over the floor and hounding him relentlessly. Walsh is still a little foul-prone, which is an occupational hazard of being a hyper-aggressive defender known for putting his nose where his defender doesn’t want it to be, but he finished Friday’s game a team-high +28.

Everybody chill a little bit about Walsh, though.

Jaylen Brown, however, doesn’t want Walsh to get too excited.

“Honestly, it’s been great,” Brown said. “I don’t want to boost his head up too much. I don’t want him to start getting cute. He’s got to still take care of the details, but he’s been doing a good job, but we’re going to need him to maintain that, so y’all don’t boost his head up too much.”

Mazzulla, meanwhile, noted that the Celtics’ shooting probably isn’t sustainable.

“I think we’re definitely going through a stretch of shooting luck, that’s for sure, that we weren’t going through at the beginning of the season,” Mazzulla said. “We’re definitely shooting the ball better than we were. So that does make everything seem better.”

Fair enough on both fronts. Don’t get cute, Jordan Walsh.

Derrick White might be coming around.

In his last five games, Derrick White is shooting 49.4 percent and 40.6 percent from three.

Almost nothing else has changed. He’s averaging essentially the same number of assists, rebounds and turnovers. His defense is still typically excellent.

But so much about the Celtics’ offense changes when White makes shots, and on Friday, he was 7-for-14 from the floor and 5-for-10 from three.

“The thing about him is, regardless of if he’s making shots or not, he plays with the level of energy, joy and detail, and like every other game, he gets one of those full-court back-tip steals in transition,” Mazzulla said. “So he doesn’t allow that stuff to bother him. Just got to continue to play and execute.

“He’s doing a good job of it.”

The Lakers were also without Marcus Smart.

Marcus Smart has missed the last few games with a back strain, but he made the trip to Boston and hung out with fans before the game. After the game, he greeted and chatted with Jaylen Brown for some time. 

Smart’s road has been rocky since the Celtics dealt him to the Grizzlies, unceremoniously sending him out the door as part of the three-team deal that landed them Kristaps Porzingis. Since then, Smart played sparingly in two seasons with the Grizzlies and Wizards before the Wizards bought him out, clearing the way for him to sign with the Lakers.

Sometimes the fit between a player and a city just makes sense—more sense than that player in another city. Smart in Boston always felt like a marriage that worked, even when it was a little rocky.

The Celtics have pretty effectively replaced Smart—they have players who buy in fully on the defensive end, and they even have a player in Walsh who makes similarly instinctive defensive highlights. A guard who plays with Smart’s reckless abandon also doesn’t project particularly well into his 30s—Smart played 54 total games in his previous two seasons.

But while the Celtics might not particularly need Smart, fans are certainly excused if they miss him.

What’s next

After sweeping a tough three-games-in-four-nights stretch that included the Cavaliers and the Lakers, the Celtics have one more difficult game from a scheduling standpoint when they take on the Raptors in Toronto at 3:30 p.m. on Sunday.

After that, they finally have some respite: Three games off before they take on the Giannis Antetokounmpo-less Bucks on Thursday in Milwaukee. They then have three more games off before the Pistons visit Boston next Monday.