White is now shooting 39.2 percent from deep in his last 10 games, averaging 20 points per game.
Derrick White and the Celtics needed to dig deep to win their fifth straight game on Sunday, taking on a Raptors team that had no intention of going down easily, but White was instrumental in closing out a 121-113 win.
Here are the takeaways.
Derrick White is back
In day-to-day or game-to-game coverage of the NBA, it can be easy to overreact to individual performances, but we now have a couple of weeks of evidence that shows that one of the most important players on the Celtics is back on track.
White is now shooting 39.2 percent from deep in his last 10 games, averaging 20 points per game, and with the Raptors zeroed in on Jaylen Brown in the second half of Sunday’s game, White hit three massive buckets in the fourth quarter.
The first may have been the biggest: The game felt like it was on the verge of disaster for the Celtics with 7:51 remaining when White erased the 3-point lead the Raptors had built with a big triple. He then found Payton Pritchard for a go-ahead three that gave the Celtics a lead they wouldn’t relinquish.
Then with 3:29 left and the Celtics up by six, White delivered a haymaker that left the Raptors staggering — a 32-foot bomb that pushed the lead to nine. His mid-range jumper a minute later pushed the advantage back to double-digits. The Raptors never mounted a serious threat again.
White is, of course, an elite defender (three blocks on Sunday!), and he’s also a highly professional player — his defense never wavered even while his shooting took a dive at the start of the year in a new, expanded role.
But, after his elite defense, perhaps White’s best attribute is his calm demeanor in the face of enormous pressure. A December game against the Raptors is far from the biggest stage on which White has performed, but the Celtics are riding an impressive surge, and faltering on Sunday would have been a mildly disappointing moment as they push higher and higher in the standings.
White’s rise back to last year’s level of production has been instrumental during that surge, and his clutch performance on Sunday — 27 points, 6-for-15 from three, four rebounds and five assists — was instrumental in keeping the surge alive.
The Celtics fell apart fast in the third quarter but bounced back
After Pritchard canned a 3-pointer with 8:33 left in the third quarter, the NBC Sports Boston broadcast crew was crowing — quite correctly! — about the Celtics’ dominance, joking that Pritchard wouldn’t be let back into Canada when the Celtics return to Toronto in a couple of months.
Then the Celtics went icy cold, and nine minutes later, they found their 23-point lead entirely erased. An offense that generated great looks and looked perfectly in sync for the first 26 minutes of the game suddenly stalled badly, as players turned the ball over and hoisted tough looks trying to get the back on track.
White and Anfernee Simons briefly staunched the bleeding 3-pointers late in the third quarter, but the Raptors tied the game and pushed themselves into the lead with an impressive stretch by Raptors guard Jamal Shead early in the fourth, whose two-way play was important for Toronto as the Celtics targeted fellow Raptors guard Immanuel Quickley repeatedly.
If the Celtics had dropped Sunday’s game, some reasonable scheduling excuses could have been made — at the end of a three-games-in-four-nights stretch (and five games in seven nights, if you turn the calendar back enough), the Celtics played and beat the Lakers in Boston on Friday before traveling to Toronto for an afternoon game less than 48 hours later.
Instead, White and Pritchard hit five combined 3-pointers in the fourth quarter, and Jaylen Brown closed the game down with free throws. The Celtics keep finding ways to win.
The new normal for Jaylen Brown
Another day, another 30-point game for Brown, who finished 9-for-19 from the floor with eight rebounds and five assists.
Brown’s massive usage numbers — now a staggering 36.8 according to Cleaning the Glass — predict that his counting stats would go up, and sure enough, he’s averaging 29 points, 6.1 rebounds and 4.9 assists.
Impressively, however, Brown’s efficiency hasn’t dipped. In fact, he’s shooting 49.7 percent from the field (up from 46.3 percent last year), 35.3 percent from three (up from 32.4) and a career-high 77.3 percent from the free-throw line.
Brown has gotten to a point where he can play a relatively unremarkable game and still pile up 30 points on efficient shooting.
Jordan Walsh defended well (and fouled out)
Speaking of new normals, opposing teams are starting to realize that Jordan Walsh in the starting lineup means that someone is going to have an uncomfortable evening.
Walsh was uniquely built to be able to defend the two most dangerous players on the Raptors: Scottie Barnes and Brandon Ingram, both of whom were suddenly faced with a hyper-energetic, hyper-athletic 21-year-old with a wingspan that equals their own at 7-foot-3.
Walsh recorded three steals, all in the first four minutes before the Raptors got their heads around how impactful he can be.
Of course, Walsh is still a hyper-energetic 21-year-old, which means he can be foul prone — between the 6:11 and 2:16 marks in the fourth quarter, he picked up three and fouled out. Two of his fouls were a result of his efforts to pressure ball-handlers bringing the ball up the floor, which is a mixed bag — on one hand, he is very disruptive, but on the other, losing him could have been costly if the Raptors had been a little closer at 2:11.
Walsh’s recent rise has been so sudden, impactful and abrupt that some bad habits that might have been considered normal for other young players seem a little incongruous. Jordan Walsh is now too important to commit bad fouls.
Sometimes you need a center to do a center’s job
The Celtics have found some success going small in recent weeks, and their ability to win in a variety of ways has been important.
But, some jobs call for a bruising big man, and Queta fit the bill perfectly on Sunday. Queta finished with 11 rebounds, and none of them were bigger than the three massive defensive boards he yanked down in quick succession in the fourth quarter as the Celtics pulled away.
Queta was +12 in the box score with his 11-point, 11-rebound and four assist double-double.
Payton Pritchard is outrageously skilled.
Let’s do a quick rundown here, shall we?
First, Pritchard maintains his balance as he’s knocked sideways a bit by Brandon Ingram navigating the screen — basic stuff for an NBA point guard, but notable nonetheless.
Then he received the pass from Queta and clocked 1) that both Jakob Poeltl and Ingram were flying at him and also 2) the splittable gap in between them. So Pritchard more or less threw the ball ahead of himself for his first dribble, ducked between the two defenders, stutter-stepped with his left foot to send Scottie Barnes backward, then pulled up as Ochai Agbaji flew out to try to contest and barely disturbed the net as his mid-range jumper dropped through. The footwork was so pristine it looked easy, the ball control was flawless, and it all added up to a simple jumper.
Pritchard finished with 15 points (6-for-12 from the floor) and six assists.
The Celtics are now third in the standings
We aren’t even at the pivotal Christmas marker in the NBA schedule yet, so we note the standings less to make a point about how good the Celtics are and more to marvel at the progress we’ve seen from a team that started 0-3. After two brutal scheduling stretches — one at the start of the year, one over the last two weeks — the Celtics are now 15-9. They have won their last five games and eight of their last 10. They are just 1.5 games behind the Knicks (who edged the Magic earlier in the afternoon) for second. They are four games behind the Pistons for first.
If this reminds you a bit of the Isaiah Thomas teams of the mid-2010s who overachieved to the point that it might have thrown a bit of a wrench into Danny Ainge’s team-building exercise, you certainly aren’t alone.
Sometimes in the NBA, you simply have to see what you have, and what the Celtics have appears to be something a little confusing, but really good.
What’s next
The Celtics were able to push their players a little extra hard despite the brutal schedule recently because their next game isn’t until Thursday when they travel to Milwaukee to take on the Bucks. As a quirk of the NBA Cup schedule, the Celtics then have three more days before they take on the Pistons in Boston.
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