During the 2020 NBA season, the third quarter was the Voldemort to the Boston Celtics’ Hogwarts, the Shredder to their Ninja Turtles. No matter how the flow of the game was unfolding, the third quarter always haunted the Celtics, with no clear reason why.
Since that season concluded, the Celtics have overcome their third-quarter demons, for the most part at least. But, on Tuesday against the Los Angeles Lakers, that enemy came to pay another visit, and like so many times before, it almost cost the Celtics the game.
Boston held a 15-point lead to begin the third quarter, having played an exceptional 24 minutes of basketball leading up to the halftime break. However, some abject offense coupled with some porous defensive decisions, allowed the Lakers to claw their way back into the game with a 32-23 quarter that saw Anthony Davis drop sixteen points.
“I think turnovers. They were switching a lot, and they kind of took away some of our off-ball actions, and we got a little bit stagnant there. And then, we settled for some tough shots. We turned it over,” Brown said when discussing how the Celtics mistakes fueled the Lakers’ comeback.
When listening to Brown’s comments during his post-game press conference, he mentioned the Lakers taking away some of the Celtics’ off-ball actions, so let’s take a look at some of the ways the Lakers looked to disrupt Boston’s offense, and how the Celtics countered those coverages — both good and bad.
If we start with the above possession, we can see that the Celtics are looking to run something out of their ‘quick’ series, most likely to get Jaylen Brown the ball around the top of the perimeter. However, Dennis Schroder does a fantastic job of staying connected to Brown in belly-up defensive coverage, limiting his ability to come off of Blake Griffin’s off-ball screen and, thus, blowing up Boston’s action.
As a counter, Brown fights through Schroder’s denial and flows into a stagger screen to give Derrick White room to curl around the screeners and attack the space behind the perimeter defense, resulting in a mid-range shot.
In fairness, Boston does like to use a ‘quick stagger’ from time to time, but considering how well Brown had been playing against the Lakers, I would hazard a guess that their first option would have been to give Brown the rock in an area where he could straight-line drive towards the bucket.
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