Boston Celtics: Defense wins championships
The Boston Celtics have the best defense in the NBA, which has allowed them to win games despite having a lot of key injuries. If Boston wants to win in the playoffs, it’ll need to continue to ride its defense.
Former head coach of the Alabama Crimson Tide football team Bear Bryant once said, “Offense sells tickets. Defense wins championships.” This statement is 100 percent accurate for any sport. Just look at some of the football or basketball teams that have either made it far or won it all.
You can score all you want, but if you can’t defend, you aren’t going to win many games. There are times where a team could score 120-plus (usually good enough to win a game), but they don’t win because they somehow gave up more points.
The Boston Celtics have lost a lot of key players this season, which has caused them to continue to do what they know best and that’s defense. Boston has seen practically its whole roster sit out and some point during the regular season, yet they still find ways to win games.
There were times where they didn’t look like a good team, but you have to give credit where credit is due. Did anyone really think they would win that many games when they continued to see players like Gordon Hayward, Marcus Smart, Kyrie Irving and many others?
Each time someone went down, it was always a “this is where they crumble” moment. Boston was able to win games because it rode its stellar defense. Brad Stevens is a top candidate for Coach of the Year and rightfully so. His coaching has allowed the Celtics to stay competitive, which allowed them to finish with the league’s top defensive team.
Later in the season is when we saw Boston start to see a lot of key players fall, which is why they finished the season with a 101.5 defensive rating. For the majority of the season, that number was either borderline 100, or in double digits.
Before the All-Star break, Boston had the NBA’s best defensive rating at 100.9. However, after the All-Star break, they fell to seventh with a rating of 103.3. The jump isn’t too alarming considering they are still one of the top defensive teams, but it’s something to keep an eye on going into the postseason.
Again, this dip in the ratings is credited to Boston losing a lot of key players. A perfect example to why defense is so important starts with the Utah Jazz. They were on the outside looking in at the playoffs. All of the sudden the Jazz made a surge behind Rudy Gobert‘s return and looked as if they couldn’t lose any games. At one point they held the 3-seed in the Western Conference, but by the end of it they finished as the 5-seed.
Before the All-Star break, Utah had a 104.0 defensive rating (sixth in NBA). Afterward, they saw that number jump all the way to 96.0 (first). That’s an incredible jump, with the difference of eight points per 100 possessions.
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If Boston wants to win in the playoffs, then it’ll need to continue to play hard-nosed defense. Looking at other previous teams that have succeeded in the playoffs, we can clearly see that if the Celtics wants to surprise some people, it starts on the defensive end.