I knew this game was going to be a test going into it. The Knicks have a few of our weaknesses covered:

1. A defense that can muck things up
2. Great offensive rebounders
3. A fast/high scoring point guard
4. A very deep and good bench

A few things went really bad for us:

1. Offensive rebounding
2. Turnovers
3. Stagnant offense
4. 30% from 3 vs. 44% from 3

Despite all this, we still came away with the win. I feel like Tatum + Porzingis are going to be unstoppable in actions together. Brown + Jrue really struggled to find themselves on offense, but Jrue was a beast defensively and Brown LED THE TEAM IN ASSISTS.

Chemistry offensively is clearly not there right now, but the defense is amazing, (outside the defensive rebounding which I knew I was going to be an issue this game when we didn’t start double-bigs).

At no point during the game did I feel the Celtics would lose. I was so confident and comfortable, even when Jaylen had those 3 awful plays in a row(2 turnovers, and the foul on the three).

This team needs to gel, but this is some scary shit, especially on defense.

I shared on twitter, but I’ll paste here

Having a look at the advanced stats of the players yesterday and the team in general we can point somethings that maybe the eyes didn’t catch much and circle back (which I’ll try to do later when I have time).

First of all, we lost badly the rebounding battle. The Knicks were almost 20% better both in ORB% and DRB%. Assists also point to a iso heavy offense compared to a more drive and kick approach from the Knicks (who also had about +20% in AST%). We also lost the TOV battle.

A few points I think I can conclude merely from the data

• We won due to our interior defense. The Knicks shot 31% from <6ft

• Though Hauser looked bad, he was still impactful

• Our rebounding needs to be better, the two “lacking” players were Jrue and

• Payton Pritchard needs to be instant offense

• Hot take: Kornet was fine.

Specifically for Al and Jrue, they are coming from a season with 17.1% DRB% and 12% DRB%, respectively. Yet, yesterday, they gave us 11.1% and 3.7%. That’s simply not enough

For PP, we need him to be aggressive. He settled for 3 three pointers. He will be exploited in this Knicks matchup because their guards are faster and stronger than him. He needs to be instant offense in that so his defensive liability is negligible.

I’m not concerned about Jaylen yet but it’s something to keep an eye on. He looked frustrated at times where the rest of the guys were in a groove.

I don’t get the JB slander. Yes, he made 2 awful passes and have 2 turnovers, but he had also 5 asists, made a couple of good plays in the third in which he became the playmaker and led the team to getting back the lead. Frankly it would be more than 5 asists if the bench was hitting their open looks. And he was not killing the ball movement with crazy isos, in fact he only took 11 shots and was efficient in general. He is not clutch in the fourth but it is not a bad game. He is a player who also frustrated me in some games in the past but last night is ok. Not the best, not clutch maybe, but there are certainly upsides like the playmaking, asists to turnover ratio and efficient shot selection. i hope that assisting would continue.

The Celtics got stomped in the math battle and still pulled it out against a good team. That’s encouraging.

Early concerns - too many minutes for KP. He isn’t surviving a season if this is how Joe is going to ride him.

Lack of structure offensively - Jrue was not utilized effectively and our offense reverted back to “your turn, my turn” for much of this game. We have so much talent that it won’t matter in most games, but this fucked us in the playoffs last year.

Good - this team is going to be insane defensively, and KP is the perfect big to complement the Jays.