Magic beat Celtics despite another big Jaylen Brown: 8 takeaways

Boston Celtics

Boston gave up 38 and 39 in the first and fourth quarters, respectively.

The Magic handed the Celtics a 123-110 loss, giving the Celtics their first defeat in the NBA Cup despite another 30+ night from Jaylen Brown.

Here are the takeaways.

Jaylen Brown was great, but …

Jaylen Brown is on a staggering run right now, and there really isn’t much an opponent can do to stop him.

Brown has mastered the art of getting his shoulders around a defender and carving out space where he wants to go. His much-maligned handle looks elite. His finishing has been pin-point precise. He’s barely hitting the rim when he shoots from mid-range. His third-quarter run on Friday was some true All-NBA-quality basketball – not for the first time this year, and not the kind of All-NBA run where you need a couple of injuries to make the third team.

The only problem for the Celtics: It’s really hard to win games when most of your offense is coming from inside the arc. Brown was great – 32 points on 15-for-28 shooting – but he was 1-for-6 from three. That’s not a problem by itself, but even a player with Brown’s punishing offseason workout schedule wears down eventually, and when he got tired or stuck on Friday, his 3-point shooting couldn’t bail the Celtics out. Neither could Sam Hauser (1-for-5) or Derrick White (1-for-6), and while Anfernee Simons finished 3-for-6, he couldn’t find the range until the fourth quarter.

Meanwhile, the Magic looked a little like last year’s Celtics – they made 17 3-pointers, finishing 17-for-36 (47.2 percent) from deep. While Brown tried to lead a comeback inside the arc, the Magic staved them off from outside it. That, unfortunately for the Celtics, is a winning formula that Joe Mazzulla has employed often, but which got reversed on Friday.

The Celtics’ centers and defense weren’t good enough.

Neemias Queta has been really good this year, and while he wasn’t perfect on Friday, he was once again the plus/minus champion among the starters – +7 in a game the Celtics lost by 13.

Once Queta went to the bench, however, the Celtics got nothing. Luka Garza struggled enormously on both ends – he was -16 in 13 minutes, and for whatever little it’s worth, the -16 matched the eye test – and even on a night when the Celtics’ centers were lacking in quality, both Chris Boucher and Xavier Tillman remained on the bench.

Meanwhile, the Celtics’ defense simply wasn’t up to the task. While they gave up 21 points in the second quarter and 25 in the third to trim down what was once a 16-point advantage in the first quarter, they gave up 38 and 39 in the first and fourth quarters, respectively. Paolo Banchero was relatively quiet, but Franz Wagner scored 27, and Desmond Bane had one of his first really good games in a Magic uniform with 22 points, six rebounds and seven assists. The Celtics won the offensive rebound battle 12-11, but they allowed the Magic to generate a ton of good looks.

The Celtics could probably improve themselves quite a bit by acquiring a better backup big man (or, of course, a better big man who relegates Queta to a regular second-unit role). To what extent they want to improve this season remains to be seen.

The margins are minuscule this year.

In the NBA’s box score, at 5:49, the league’s scorekeepers list a “Bad Pass TURNOVER” by J. Minott, which really neatly describes one of the worst turnovers you will ever see.

The Celtics were leading by a point at that stage and had just put together a really important defensive stop. Jaylen Brown had a rebound poked away, but Josh Minott hustled after it and tracked it down in the corner.

Minott then made the inexplicable decision to pass the ball back to Brown with Anthony Black visibly lurking just behind him. The pass was doomed as soon as it left Minott’s hands – a shockingly poor decision from a player who has been overwhelmingly positive to start the season.

Did Brown call for the ball? Did Minott freeze up? Did he miss Black somehow? Whatever the case, it was the beginning of the end for the Celtics – the Magic doubled them up the rest of the way, out-scoring them 28-14 after Black’s steal.

The margins are always small in a league as talented as full of talent as the NBA, but the Celtics were rarely outclassed in terms of talent over the last two years. This year, one Bad Pass TURNOVER can start an avalanche.

Payton Pritchard’s shot came back.

Payton Pritchard bumped up his 3-point shooting percentage ever-so-slightly against the Wizards by going 2-for-6, but he entered Friday’s game a queasy 22.4 percent from behind the arc.

The bad thing about Pritchard shooting 22.4 percent from behind the arc is self-evident. The good thing, however, is that he’s due for a massive rise to the mean. On Friday, Pritchard – who is simply far too good a shooter to have an entire down year – seemed to start to get his 3-point shot on track. He finished 5-for-8 from deep, scoring 27 points on 8-for-16 shooting.

Pritchard has made up for his 3-point struggles so far by becoming one of the best drivers in the league – the NBC Sports Boston broadcast noted that Pritchard was shooting a higher percentage on drives than Giannis Antetokounmpo and Luka Doncic this season while still performing them at volume with 11.2 per game.

Still, as we noted with Brown, the Celtics really do need him to make 3-pointers, too. Trading twos for threes is a bad formula in 2025.

Anfernee Simons is so predictably good at getting hot.

Simons struggled to find the range for much of the game, but as soon as he hit a 3-pointer, he became automatic – burying two more and a tough mid-range jumper to salvage his stat line in the fourth quarter.

Brian Scalabrine is fond of saying “it only takes one” for an NBA player to get hot, but perhaps nobody embodies that better than Simons.

Simons, we should note, struggled with Orlando’s size and physicality defensively. He may need to get hot sooner on Sunday to be a net positive.

Jordan Walsh played his second good game in a row.

The Celtics have gotten a rotating streak of decent performances from fringe rotation players, which is a nice problem to have but still a little confounding as Joe Mazzulla tries to nail down his rotation.

On Friday, Jordan Walsh put together his second straight solid performance after he was a +27 in 24 minutes against the Wizards on Wednesday. Walsh played most of his minutes in the first half, but his defensive energy made him difficult to remove from the game in the second quarter. Some of his better moments were a reminder as to why scouts compared him to Marcus Smart – he makes plays instinctively that other players just can’t make. He has a Smart-like slither to his screen navigation on and off the ball, and his harassing defense seemed to make Wagner uncomfortable at times.

Walsh’s box score doesn’t pop (two points, 1-for-3 shooting), but he was more disruptive than his lone steal and block will indicate; his six rebounds were important, and he scored a tough swooping finish in the third quarter.

The NBA Cup created some weirdness at the end.

The NBA Cup kills NBA decorum at the end of games, since point differential matters in the standings.

With seven seconds left and the Magic up by 11, Jalen Suggs missed a deep 3-pointer, but he got the rebound and drove to the rim, scoring a layup that was inconsequential to the results of the game. The Celtics tried to answer, but Franz Wagner swatted Payton Pritchard at the rim and screamed at the Magic bench. Joe Mazzulla then inserted Queta back into the game for the final second in an attempt to get a lob at the rim, which didn’t work but showed how far teams are willing to go on the off chance that an extra bucket or two will matter in an effort to get out of group play.

It might!

What’s next

The Celtics get another crack at the Magic on Sunday at 6 p.m. That’s the first of a three-games-in-four-nights stretch that features the 76ers on Tuesday and the Grizzlies on Wednesday before the schedule finally lightens up briefly – the Celtics get three days off before they take on the Clippers next Sunday.