Boston Celtics: 3 takeaways from Game 3 vs. Bucks

3. Offensive struggles

There’s not a question that Boston’s biggest struggles have come on the offensive side of the ball. The Celtics have proven all year that they’re one of the best teams on offense. However, if they can’t score or even play next to perfect defense, they’re usually in a dogfight or finding themselves losing games.

Friday night’s game against the Bucks was a perfect example of that. Boston was unable to score and kept allowing the Bucks to score the ball. The visiting team ultimately finished the game with 92 points. Here’s the point production for the Celtics through each quarter.

• First quarter: 12
• Second quarter: 23
• Third quarter: 32
• Fourth quarter: 25

As stated before, their best quarter was clearly in the third. They manage to get within 14, but after that there wasn’t really any traction. No one on the roster was able to score over 20 points. The highest-scoring player was Horford with 16 points. Monroe had 15 and Jayson Tatum had 14. Other than those three, the offensive production was pretty slim.

Boston’s bench failed to show up once again. The C’s had valuable offensive production from Monroe, but beyond him there really wasn’t much help. They only were able to score 19 points from their bench (not counting Monroe). That number is deceiving because the bench played most of the fourth quarter. Terry Rozier logged 31 minutes and was the only player to see over 30 minutes of action as well.

Boston shot the ball 40 percent from the field on 80 attempts and 33.3 percent from 3 on 24 attempts. If the Celtics are unable to find any offensive rhythm, they may be in for a long series.