Category: Sports News

Making sense of the Celtics' early-season slumps, bumps and grumps originally appeared on NBC Sports Boston

The losses were not supposed to sting this much.

We were certain that, with a new-look roster and tempered expectations, the Boston Celtics’ viewing experience would be largely stress free. We were convinced fans wouldn’t feel the bumps in the road as much as they have in past seasons, where every loss in a championship-or-bust campaign felt like a stomach punch. If this new campaign was going to be a bit of a roller coaster, we were prepared with transition-year Dramamine.

We couldn’t have been more wrong. 

The losses still gnaw at you — in large part because, while the team looks different, the losses often look the same.

These Celtics can’t hold double-digit leads. Their play vacillates wildly from quarter to quarter. When their 3-point shots are not falling, they remain a tough watch, particularly given their propensity to let empty offensive possessions impact their defensive effort.

On Monday night, the Celtics should have been eager to dust themselves off after a beatdown from the championship-chasing Houston Rockets at the tail end of a five-game-in-seven-days stretch. That one was easy to chalk up as a schedule loss. But Monday was the ultimate “get right” game against a Utah Jazz team that had gotten pummeled in Charlotte the night before and was missing one of its key bigs in Walker Kessler. 

Yet, somehow, it was Boston that didn’t have enough gas in the tank in the second half Monday night, as offensive rebounds still came back to bite the Celtics.

After a defensive gem of a first half that put the Celtics ahead by double digits, Boston’s defense disappeared in the second half, the team’s effort waning as it repeatedly clanged quality 3-point looks. Keyonte George morphed into Michael Jordan for a stretch, 37-year-old Kevin Love rolled back the clocks, and Jusuf Nurkic’s putback in the final moments lifted Utah to a 105-103 triumph at TD Garden.

The Celtics’ 3-point shooting was historically bad for their volume. The C’s set an NBA record by missing 40 their 51 triples, posting the lowest 3-point percentage (21.6 percent) in league history by a team with 50-plus attempts. 

Would it make you feel any better to know the NBA tracking data suggested all those 3-point looks were pretty good? It probably won’t, right? But 50 of Boston’s 51 attempts came with 4+ feet of space from the nearest defender. The Celtics made just 2 of 21 attempts with 4 to 6 feet of space, and 9 of 29 attempts with 6+ feet of space. 

Derrick White and Payton Pritchard, who both made 3s in the opening minutes when Boston ripped off a 10-0 run, quickly reverted to their season-opening struggles. There are 178 players who qualify on the list of NBA’s 3-point percentage leaders this season. Here’s where Boston players rank:

• 178th: Payton Pritchard
• 171st: Derrick White
• 95th: Anfernee Simons
• 92nd: Jaylen Brown
• 69th: Sam Hauser

Pritchard and White were a combined 7 for 19 on Monday night, which is actually progress. Hauser improbably went 1 for 8 from distance. Simons wasn’t much better (2 for 8). Brown missed all nine 3-pointers he attempted, though he kept Boston’s offense afloat by making 13 of 19 shots inside the arc while producing a team-high 36 points. 

It seems impossible that White and Pritchard won’t eventually get on track. But as they struggle from distance to start the season, it only makes the margins that much slimmer for a Boston team with a bunch of new vulnerabilities. And, yet, if the Celtics’ defensive energy didn’t wane in the second half, they very well might have survived a historically bad shooting night.

Spare us all the chatter about the referees’ missed call on a George trip of Brown in the final minute. Yes, it should have been a whistle. No, it’s not a valid excuse for not winning this game. We don’t need a Last 2 Minute report to confirm the referee error.

Our Last 24 Minute report notes the Celtics tripped all over themselves repeatedly in the second half without aid from the Jazz or the referees. 

Brown has been fantastic, and it’s frustrating that Boston’s supporting cast hasn’t been able to help him more. It’s also annoying that, with multiple last-gasp opportunities in tight games against Philadelphia and Utah, the Celtics have been unable to get Brown a clean look at a winning shot. Brown got whistled (correctly) for a push-off before the Celtics’ final possession with 0.6 seconds to play Monday night.

Brown vented about the missed tripping call after the game but, like a good leader, eventually suggested he has to do more to help his team as this group hunts for an identity early in the new season. The truth is the supporting cast has to do more, and Brown’s efforts have been spoiled by the team’s shooting funks.

Neemias Queta will kick himself about a missed late-game free throw and his inability to box out Nurkic on Utah’s winning shot. Josh Minott can’t get in early foul trouble, which limited his floor time. Boston needs more from its bench, where every single player not named Chris Boucher was in the negative for plus/minus Monday night. 

Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that the Celtics are experiencing these growing pains. But it all seems so preventable, which makes it harder to stomach. Boston has all the potential to outkick its tempered expectations and yet hasn’t played with anywhere near the sort of consistency that would allow that.

Chalk it up to early-season growing pains, but the Celtics’ lack of focus and discipline Monday night was inexcusable. The Rockets were simply on a different level on Saturday and the rest disadvantage didn’t help. But much of Boston’s woes in the team’s other four losses this season were largely self-inflicted.

Maybe all this team needs is White and Pritchard to get off the 3-point schneid. Maybe the Celtics just need to be mentally tougher when shots aren’t falling and lean into their obvious defensive potential instead of losing their minds. 

It’s easy to say we should have braced ourselves for these bumps given the roster changes. But there’s too much talent and potential here to be OK with the Celtics losing games the way they did Monday night.

Jaylen sounds off on late no-call in Celtics-Jazz: ‘It's unacceptable' originally appeared on NBC Sports Boston

Boston Celtics star Jaylen Brown was understandably frustrated after officials did not whistle Utah Jazz guard Keyonte George for a tripping foul in the final minute of Monday’s game at TD Garden.

With less than a minute remaining and the Celtics clinging to a one-point lead, George fell to the ground, and Brown tripped over him while trying to drive into the paint. The Celtics star lost the ball as a result of the trip, and the Jazz scored a bucket in transition to take a 103-102 lead with 44 seconds remaining.

“Y’all are going to get me fined,” Brown responded when asked about the play. “You can’t have a mistake like that as an official at that point in the game. It’s fourth quarter. It’s a minute left in the game, or less. And you completely — the whole staff blows the f—ing call. Costs us the game.

“Unacceptable. You can make mistakes at any point in the game, but right there, that wasn’t good. That wasn’t good. It’s unacceptable.

“Then they’re telling me like, ‘We didn’t see it.’ How none of you see it? You can’t trip somebody in the fourth quarter and it just be a no-call. It’s some bulls—,” Brown said.

When asked about the no-call after the game in a pool report, lead official Kevin Scott explained why no foul was called in that situation.

“During live play the crew observed George slip and fall just prior to Brown slipping on the same spot resulting in the ball becoming loose prior to any contact,” Scott told The Boston Globe’s Adam Himmelsbach.

“… The crew observed both players slip and fall prior to any contact. That’s why a foul was not called during live play.”

While that explanation likely won’t satisfy Brown or Celtics fans, that no-call wasn’t the only reason Boston this game. The Jazz outrebounded the Celtics 55 to 36 and racked up 15 offensive rebounds, the last of which was a Jusuf Nurkic putback over Neemias Queta with 0.6 seconds remaining that sealed Boston’s fate.

As for Brown, he should expect to be hearing from the league at some point after sounding off on the officials Monday night.

Kings reportedly agree to contract with Precious Achiuwa, waive Isaac Jones originally appeared on NBC Sports Bay Area

The Kings have agreed to a contract with free agent forward/center Precious Achiuwa, ESPN’s Shams Charania reported, citing sources.

In a corresponding move to make roster space, the Kings are expected to waive center Isaac Jones, per Charania. 

Achiuwa, in his sixth NBA season, was waived by the Miami Heat on Oct. 18 in their final roster cuts following training camp. He was selected by the Heat with the No. 20 pick in the 2020 NBA Draft. He was traded to the Toronto Raptors before the 2021 season, and was later traded to the New York Knicks in December 2023. 

Last season for the Knicks, Achiuwa played in 57 games and started in 10. He averaged 6.6 points and 5.6 rebounds per game. 

Jones, now in his second NBA season, originally signed a two-way contract with the Kings in July 2024. Last season, he played 40 games for Sacramento and averaged 3.4 points and 1.4 rebounds per game in just 7.6 minutes per game. This season, he played in just three of the Kings’ seven games, totaling just 3 points.  

Jones’ lone field goal this season came during his Oct. 24 start against the Utah Jazz. 

Achiuwa will vie for playing time off the bench with other Kings centers, like Drew Eubanks, Maxime Raynaud and Dylan Cardwell. 

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Andrew Wiggins was among the first superstar prospects of the social media era. Born in Thornhill, Ontario just north of Toronto, Wiggins was known internationally by the time he was 13. It wasn’t always easy for the shy, small-town kid to embrace the spotlight.

After just one full season at Vaughan, Wiggins needed better competition than Canada could provide and moved on to Huntington Prep in Huntington, West Virginia — a relatively new prep school set in a small, blue-collar, sports-oriented college town near Kansas.

The head coach, Rob Fulford, had been recruiting Wiggins since he was 13, at one point watching 24 consecutive CIA Bounce games in person. “We developed a relationship with him,” Fulford said. “We recruited him harder than anyone else.”

What stood out to Fulford was the same quality that would later get the young Wiggins in trouble, which was that everything he did looked so effortless. “He could just dominate a game from a talent perspective,” Fulford says. “It just was a clear difference between Andrew and everyone else.”

But there was nothing quiet about the show Wiggins was putting on the basketball court, as Huntington quickly became the most popular high school team in the country, going from having 50 fans at a regular home game prior to his arrival to packed gyms with over 1,000 fans there to see the Canadian high school phenom with their own eyes. “A lot of people just wanted to see him play,” Rathan-Mayes says. “We tried to go and put on a show the best that we could every single night.”

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But being at the centre of the basketball universe didn’t come naturally to the quiet kid from Vaughan. After all, shyness, like athleticism, runs in the Wiggins family: Wiggins’s father, Mitchell Sr, said the reason it didn’t work at his first college, Clemson, was that “I was so quiet, you couldn’t get a whisper out of me.” While a track teammate of his mother, Marita, said, “She was very quiet, still is very quiet and very unassuming.”

Unlike LeBron James, who was happy to engage with the media and put on a show for the crowd since being crowned “The Chosen One” as a teenager, Wiggins was soft-spoken and shy, preferring to pass the attention on to his teammates instead of beating his chest after a big dunk. Many people wanted Wiggins to be the version of an alpha athlete that they were used to seeing on TV, like James and Kobe Bryant. And that dissonance created a tension with the basketball media and certain segments of the fan base, who wanted more from Wiggins.

“I think we all have a certain kind of perception of what we want a great athlete to look like,” his junior national team coach, Roy Rana, says. “We want them to be fiery. We want them to be emotional. We want them to be extroverted. We want them to be demonstrative. That’s not Andrew.”

The criticism picked up during Wiggins’s second and final season at Huntington Prep when, in February of 2013, a Sports Illustrated article questioned his work ethic, suggesting that he only showed up in big games while lofting through less important ones. “Andrew Wiggins’ work ethic and motor have yet to catch up to his athleticism and raw ability,” it read, bringing up examples of previous Canadian prospects whose careers stagnated as a result of poor decision-making or a lack of skill development. And it questioned the role models in his life, including his father, who was pushed out of the NBA for cocaine use decades earlier.

The day after the article came out, Wiggins dropped a career-high 57 points in a statement win. “I think it pissed him off,” Fulford says. “He wanted to prove a point.”

“Just responding in a positive way,” Wiggins says. “Not saying anything, not … going on Twitter and saying anything … whenever you think you got something to say, just go on the court and do my thing.”

Wiggins compiled one of the most memorable campaigns in high school basketball history that season, averaging 23 points, 11 rebounds, three assists, and three blocks per game and winning the Naismith Prep Player of the Year and the Gatorade National Player of the Year awards, earning a trip to the McDonald’s All-American Game. After that, he left to go to the University of Kansas.

But the spotlight didn’t stop there. In fact, when Wiggins arrived at Kansas City International Airport in June of 2013, he emerged from the gate to find 15 fans waiting for his autograph after his itinerary had been posted on an online message board. When classes started, students began Twitter-stalking him, tweeting pictures of the back of his head in class and posting his whereabouts when he was spotted at local stores. Meanwhile, back home in Canada, Wiggins picked up the nicknames “Maple Jordan” and “Air Canada,” and all of his Kansas games were broadcasted on the national TV network TSN.

While all this might seem normal now, 2013 was the beginning of the social media era. And between the fans stalking him, the student sections taunting him at away games, and the rapidly expanding media landscape criticizing his every move, it was hard for Wiggins to feel comfortable. “We talk about it sometimes, but he doesn’t like talking about it. That’s how bad it stresses him out,” his wife, Mychal Johnson, said at the time. “Sometimes he doesn’t know what to do.”

“It was a lot,” Wiggins says now. “It was a lot.”

Wiggins just wanted to be a normal kid. He happened to love basketball and be really good at it, but he wanted an average life away from the spotlight, playing Call of Duty after games and announcing his college decision without any media present. In fact, his Twitter bio used to read “Just a average kid trying to make it.”

But when he was asked about it during his freshman year at Kansas, Wiggins said, “I used to be an average kid, when I put that up. But that … was a while ago.”

Some of the criticism directed towards Wiggins was warranted. Even Fulford acknowledged that he was no gym rat – that things came so naturally to Wiggins that he needed to fall in love with the process of improving if he was going to reach his ceiling. “I don’t think at any point ever that anyone had to go tell Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant to pick it up,” Fulford said.

Wiggins quietly improved under head coach Bill Self at Kansas, averaging 17 points, six rebounds, two assists, one steal, and one block as a freshman for the No 2-ranked Jayhawks, who went 24-9 before losing in the second round of the NCAA tournament. He even set the Kansas freshman single-season scoring record with 597 points.

Still, there were times that Self had to get on Wiggins to play harder or be more aggressive offensively, instituting a special rule at some practices that only Wiggins was allowed to shoot. “Andrew is the type of guy who could score 28, and you’d say, ‘Why didn’t he score more?’” Self said. “Critics want him to do more. I understand that because the game comes so easy to him, it’s so natural.”

Some of that on-court reticence came from the way Wiggins was raised, learning the game from his brothers and dad, who carved out a 20-year pro career as a defensive role player. “His dad taught him how to play basketball the right way,” Reid-Knight says, noting that Mitchell Sr always harped on the importance of being selfless and making the right reads. “Playing within your game and not forcing an action.”

After one season at Kansas, Wiggins declared for the 2014 NBA Draft and was selected first overall by the Cleveland Cavaliers – a foregone conclusion since Wiggins was in 10th grade. What made the selection even more amazing was that his CIA Bounce teammate, Brampton native Anthony Bennett, went first overall to Cleveland the year prior, giving Canada back-to-back first overall picks for the first time ever.

The 2014 NBA Draft also featured Canadians Tyler Ennis, Nik Stauskas, and Dwight Powell, giving Canada a record 12 NBA players. That year Canada overtook France as the second-most represented country in the league behind the United States – a record it has held ever since.

However, the best player in the world, James, returned to his hometown Cleveland in free agency that same summer. And before playing a single game in the NBA, Wiggins and Bennett were both traded to the rebuilding Minnesota Timberwolves in exchange for Kevin Love, making Wiggins the cornerstone of a franchise that had not been to the playoffs in 10 years. “I just gave in to it and figured I’d be good wherever I go,” Wiggins said. “The whole thing has worked out. [Minnesota has] put me in a situation where I can grow a lot more than on the team that drafted me.”

Wiggins got off to a slow start in his NBA career before breaking out against the team that snubbed him, dropping 27 points in his first game against James’s Cavaliers. He followed it up with a stretch of six straight 20-point games, eventually becoming the first Canadian to win the NBA Rookie of the Year award after averaging 17 points, five rebounds, and two assists a game in 2014–15.

While he never turned into the NBA superstar that many people had him pegged to become when he was a teenager, Wiggins went on to have an incredible career, spending five and a half seasons in Minnesota before getting traded to the Golden State Warriors in 2020. In the Bay, Wiggins became the third Canadian NBA All-Star and won an NBA championship as the team’s second-leading scorer in the 2022 NBA Finals, when he averaged 18 points and nine rebounds.

But, for better or worse, the huge spotlight and unbalanced criticism that started to shine on Wiggins when he was a teenage phenom never left him, especially in Canada – a basketball-crazed nation that was growing hungry for a superstar.

As Wiggins once said, “I know I can never live up to expectations.”

• This is an edited extract from The Golden Generation: How Canada Became a Basketball Powerhouse by Oren Weisfeld. It’s published by ECW Press for $19.95 (USD) wherever you get your books.

Warriors' defense adjusting to next steps in NBA's pace and space evolution originally appeared on NBC Sports Bay Area

SAN FRANCISCO – From what he’s seeing on the Warriors’ sidelines to reviewing film, the game Warriors coach Steve Kerr is watching isn’t close to what the NBA was 10 years ago. Not even five. 

What it looked like when he won all those championships as a player in the 1990s, and his final season in 2003, was closer to silent films than the product seen in the Warriors’ two straight losses to short-handed teams. 

The Milwaukee Bucks announced an hour ahead of tipoff that Giannis Antetokounmpo was ruled out Thursday night after being probable on the injury report all day. On top of Tyrese Haliburton being out for the season from his torn Achilles in Game 7 of the NBA Finals, the Indiana Pacers didn’t have a win and they didn’t have Andrew Nembhard, Obi Toppin, Bennedict Mathurin and T.J. McConnell on Saturday. But both teams raced right by the Warriors.

Ryan Rollins, their own former second-round draft pick, did for a career-high 32 points, eight assists and one turnover. Quenton Jackson, a 27-year-old former undrafted point guard on a two-way contract, did for 25 points and 10 assists – both career highs – without turning the ball over once. 

“The pace of the game is off the charts these days. It’s been getting faster and faster, year after year,” Kerr said Monday at Chase Center after Warriors practice. “But I even think it’s taken a leap this year, just in terms of style of play. And this is how it works in basketball and technology and everything else, right? The game is constantly changing. So to me, what I’m seeing is teams are spreading it out, playing as fast as possible, making it difficult to get to your coverages defensively. 

“The faster the actions, the more difficult it is for the defense to respond, and I thought the pace of the Milwaukee and Indiana games exposed some things that we were doing defensively, and we’ve got to improve those things to get better.” 

Principles of the game haven’t changed. The goal defensively still is to keep your man in front of you and avoid penetration. If a defender can stay between his man and the ball, it’s the same game that it’s always been. But the game is being played so differently with the pace and the space and the 3-point shot, that staying true to those principles has become a much more difficult proposition.

How speedy players like Rollins and Jackson scored their points is case in point. Rollins in his 32-point outing finished six layups, made five threes and two jumpers. Outside of two free throws, Jackson’s other 23 points came from five layups and one dunk, three catch-and-shoot threes and a two-pointer from seven feet out after beating Draymond Green to the spot. 

The Warriors rank 12th in defensive rating (112.7) through seven games entering Tuesday night’s game against the Phoenix Suns, and 12th in opponents points per game (115.7). Opponents also are getting what they want and shooting 48.2 percent against the Warriors’ defense. Only six teams are letting teams shoot better from the field. 

Kerr’s assessment of his team’s defense as it currently stands is a bit of a mixed bag. 

“A little bit betwixt in between,” Kerr said. “I think because of all this pace and the way teams are playing, you have to adapt and you can’t expect to do the exact same things you did even the year before. And every game is a little bit different. 

“Clippers, Lakers, Denver, those felt more like traditional games where you’re in your coverage. You have time to talk through stuff. Portland, Milwaukee, Indiana, Memphis, it’s a much faster game, more random and you’ve got to be very disciplined in a lot of different aspects, otherwise you get exposed.” 

Portland, Milwaukee and Indiana were all Golden State losses. Memphis, which ranks seventh in pace, was a win, but the Grizzlies had eight more fastbreak points than the Warriors, and just as many points in the paint (48). The Blazers rank third in pace, and the Bucks and Pacers are less than a point outside of the top 10. Right behind the both of them are the Suns, the next team on the Warriors’ schedule. 

“Another team that plays fast and aggressive,” Moses Moody said of the Suns. “They got talent in different areas on the floor. Just another young and fast team.” 

The center position in particular has seen major changes offensively and defensively in a game that emphasizes speed and threes. Quinten Post started at center for the Warriors in their loss against the Bucks and only played 10 minutes, yet Gary Trent Jr. attempted three 3-pointers on him in 36 seconds and missed all three. Centers Donovan Clingan and Jock Landale have each taken two threes on Post earlier this season and made three of four. 

Post this season has seen small forward Kawhi Leonard take five shots on him in 56 seconds, making one, and point guard Jrue Holiday go 1 of 4 when guarded by the 7-footer over 39 seconds. The responsibilities for big men, too, aren’t what they used to be. 

“Now on the defensive end it’s more than just rim protection, guarding the pick and roll. If teams play this fast and this chaotic in a way, you kind of have to adapt too on the defensive end,” Post says. “For me, on a personal level, it means guarding inside and on the outside. As a team, it’s just a lot more chaos out there, and I think the biggest thing for us is whatever we do defensively, we just got to do it with 100 percent effort.”

But the Warriors still have the ultimate executioner of offenses. Even at 35 years old and with his beard being overtaken by gray hairs, Green is the difference in how the Warriors’ defense operates. The Warriors’ defense shuts down offenses to 105.7 points per 100 possessions when he’s on the court. 

That number skyrockets to 124.3 points per 100 possessions when Green, who has played in all seven games, is not on the court. 

“Draymond is the best in the world at covering for his teammates, creating deception for the offensive player, which just makes him hesitate for a second,” Kerr said. “He’s amazing with that stuff. So when he’s not out there, we better be rock solid with our discipline and principles that we have to follow in order to make teams have to work.” 

At the root of it, the problems begin with better communication. So much is happening on the fly that one false step can be all the difference. 

“Some of it is we’ve just got to get on the same page,” Moody says. “We have different terminology, different principles that are changing with the change of the game. Everybody just has to be on the same page and communicate. … If we’re switching one through five, it might not have the same principles that if you’re switching a guard-to-guard screen in a regular situation. If we’re switching all game, it’s small details like that to where we just got to get on the same page.”

Disregarding small details is how losses to lesser, undermanned teams happen. The Warriors haven’t lost three straight regular season games since Dec. 27, 2024, six weeks before acquiring Jimmy Butler. Getting back on the same page defensively while constantly adapting to the game’s changes is how the Warriors can keep that streak alive and put an end to their first losing streak of the season.

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