No, The Boston Celtics’ Offense Is Not Ruining NBA Basketball

Canning a comical 29 of their 61 three-point attempts, the Boston Celtics routed the New York Knicks, 132-109, on opening night. They tied an NBA record for made threes in a game. A season ago, Boston’s three-point attack helped fuel its dominant title run. Last night, a new-look New York team with championship aspirations failed to slow Boston’s buzzsaw offense.

Instead of praise for the Celtics’ lights-out shooting, some discourse discussed this performance as perilous to basketball. Pundits lamented this “boring” Celtics style of offense proliferating throughout the league. Others turned to the rulebook, proposing frankly asinine changes like forcing players to leave the corner after three seconds.

Why are we so quick to dismiss greatness instead of appreciating it? The Boston Celtics are a basketball machine. They swing the ball, rebound and defend at a level basketball coaches dream of. Among the sects of basketball media that yearn for the time when stagnant mid-range and post-offense reigned supreme, Boston’s style marks a stark contrast.

Boston’s shooting explosion wasn’t an accident. Last season’s championship culminated years of sharp team building, schematic development and player performance. All of that coalesces into a basketball product some may not enjoy, but is inarguably effective. 

The Celtics’ Offense Is Intricately Good

So much of the mainstream analysis surrounding last night’s game centered on New York’s shoddy defensive effort and Boston shooting at an outlier level. While there’s truth to both of those factors, how the Celtics generate open triples deserves nuance and discussion. Take this play from the second quarter, which ended in a Derrick White corner three:

derrick richard white three point basket pic.twitter.com/ii1zWpnzfk

— ben pfeifer (@bjpf_) October 23, 2024

Before the Jayson Tatum ball screen, White sets a “Ram” screen (down screen for the center) and fills the strong-side dunker spot. Conventional wisdom would send White to the corner on this play to vacate the paint. But Boston purposefully anchors White in the paint to force one of New York’s guards (in this case, Miles McBride) to defend the hoop. Positioning Payton Pritchard on the strong side instead of Jaylen Brown forces a much weaker defender, Jalen Brunson, to guard in space.

When Kornet catches on the short roll, the Celtics see a three-on-two advantage. With Brown spaced to the opposite corner, Josh Hart can’t roam and help on the play. McBride steps up to Kornet, so Brunson must sink down and cover the interior pass to White. From there, Pritchard and White pass and move to force Brunson to cover much more space than he’s comfortable doing.

With Tatum as the primary ball-handler, Mikal Bridges can’t help out on the weak side. To combat his lethal pull-up shooting, the Knicks pull their center out of the paint, leaving the two guards helpless. There’s so much detail to this ostensibly simple play, something that permeates throughout Boston’s offense.

No NBA team is better at creating favorable matchups. After Boston cross-matches guards like Jrue Holiday onto bigs, they hunt advantages in early offense. With Holiday guarding Karl-Anthony Towns on many possessions, Towns must then check Holiday in early offense. As we saw, that’s an untenable matchup for the Knicks most of the time.

How can we expect NBA fans to understand, let alone appreciate, these details when color commentators spend so much airtime manufacturing a “revenge tour” story instead of focusing on the basketball in front of them? How can anyone enjoy something they don’t know is happening in the first place?

NBA teams will try and fail to replicate the Celtics’ model, just as they did with the dynastic San Antonio Spurs and Golden State Warriors. It’s not easy to play like Boston does and find success, despite how effortless it looks on the floor. Even if every team mirrored Boston’s approach exactly, we’d see plenty of variations, given how different players are.

All five of Boston’s regular starters, plus Al Horford, Payton Pritchard and Sam Hauser, are elite shooters. The Celtics’ snappy decision-making — notably Tatum, White and Holiday — is just as paramount. No other team, not even the oft-compared Oklahoma City Thunder, can match Boston’s shooting and basketball feel across the roster (even the Thunder placed 18th in three-point frequency last season!).

As it always has, the game of basketball will continue to evolve. We shouldn’t be frightened by this growth. Teams will adapt, learn and grow like usual, developing new tactics and strategies to maximize talent. Nobody has to love how Boston plays basketball. It’s fine to prefer slower-paced, interior-based offenses like that of the Denver Nuggets or Philadelphia 76ers. But let’s not freak out about the Celtics “ruining basketball.” Somehow, these doomsday prophecies never seem to come true. The Basketball Gods are on our side.