Hal14 wrote:The only stat that worries me is our 3Pr. I posted about this earlier in the season, but if we go back to the 14-15 season and look at the teams that have won championships, the highest 3Pr in the reg season by a team that won the title was .456 and that was the 2022 Warriors.
If we look at teams that did not have Steph/Klay (because the Celtics do not have arguably the 2 greatest shooters to ever pick up a basketball to we probably shouldn't shoot as many 3's as them), it's the 2021 Bucks at .404.
If we look at playoffs 3Pr, the highest 3Pr for a team that won a recent title was .433 (2022 warriors) and if we remove the Splash brothers warriors teams it's .407 (2020 lakers but they had flukey 3 pt shooting in the bubble), the 2019 raptors were at .407..and the 2017 Cavs (didn't win title but made finals) at .408.
This tells me, that ideally we don't really want to be higher than a .410 3Pr. We definitely don't want to be higher .456 (the highest number in this post).
Yet the Celtics right now are no. 1 in the league with a .471 3Pr. We're playing with fire by having such a high 3Pr. It's just not a recipe that has proven to win titles - or even to make it to the NBA finals. Celtics made NBA finals in 2022 with a 3Pr of .425 in reg season and .448 in playoffs. But then last season we came up short of the NBA finals with a 3Pr of .480 in reg season and .452 in playoffs.
It's already been discussed on here quite a bit. But when you rely so heavily on the 3, you leave your chances of winning up to shooting luck/shooting variance. You could have a big advantage in talent, but if you take a million 3's, then it pretty much negates that talent advantage and makes the outcome of the game a tossup - if your shots fall, you win. If your shots don't fall, you lose (that's why middle school/high school/college teams, even sometimes in the NBA like Miami who are facing a team with more talent than them will often play zone defense). And deep into the playoffs when teams play *really* hard, the pressure is on, the games are closer, defenses tighten up and the difference between winning/losing is so small (just a bounce here, a shot there, a play here and that's it), you want to have your players, your talent be able to win you the game/series and not just leave it up to shooting luck or have it be a tossup, after working so hard all season.
There's tons of content online (clips on Twitter, YouTube vids, articles, etc.) where opposing teams/players say that the game plan against Boston is to clog the lane and dare us to shoot 3's. This strategy (and our over-reliance on 3's) is a big reason why we lost to Miami in the 2023 ECF, it's a reason why we lost to GS in 2022 NBA finals, it's a reason why the Hawks and Sixers series' in 2023 went more games than they should have and it's a big reason why we were such an inconsistent team during the 22-23 reg season - went 36-20 (.642 winning %) after we started the season off 21-5 (.807 winning %) mostly due to unsustainably hot shooting from 3. We had three different 3 game losing streaks during the 22-23 reg season after that hot shooting start to the season. Why? I'm willing to bet that in those 9 games (including back to back losses to an Orlando team that missed the play-in) we had cold shooting from 3 but took lots of 3's..just like we lost 3 games in a row to Miami in the ECF where we had cold shooting from 3 but took lots of 3's.
I like our chances to win it all. But if we come up short, I'm pretty sure it's going to be because of either injuries to our key players (nothing you can really do about that, it's pretty much out of your control..just try to add another decent bench player to help with depth) and/or the over-reliance on 3's.
Even if I disagree with your take that the Celtics take too many threes, I understand where you are coming from. What I don't understand is how you are trying to twist the math to get it to support your opinion. You just can't say that there has never been a team shooting this many threes that won the NBA championship therefore the Celtics are shooting too many threes to win the NBA championship while failing to mention that there has basically never been any team that shot as many threes as the Celtics ever (*). So any historical comparison is basically moot at this point.
The three point attempt rate has risen so fast over the last 15 years that trying to do an historical comparison of that stat amongst NBA champions doesn't make any sense. You either include teams from a complete different era of NBA offenses or restrict yourself to such a small sample size that it's basically meaningless.
What we do know is that the efficiency of NBA offenses has risen dramatically over that time just as the three point attempt rate did too. The correlation is clear. While that doesn't imply causation, it makes sense conceptually that trading less efficient shots for threes and forcing defense to guard farther out and open up driving lanes in the process would result in a better offense overall. In fact, the rise of both offensive rating and three point attempt rate league wide has yet to plateau.
In that context, it's possible that we have not yet to reach the point where NBA teams take too many threes and the Celtics shooting more threes than any one else ever might just mean they are ahead of the curve and that the rest of the league is playing catch up
(Boston being top three finishes in offensive rating in back to back years provides some anecdotal evidence that this is the case).
Maybe Mazzulla through genius coaching or random luck has stumbled into the optimal mix of three point attempts. Maybe other NBA teams are actually at the perfect amount of three point attempts and the Celtics have gone too far in jacking up threes resulting in less shots at the rim and a suboptimal offense overall. The point is that because we have virtually no prior for what the Celtics are trying on offense, we can't use historical comps to determine how likely to suceed their strategy is going to be.
As for the "what happens when the threes don't fall" argument, I've never found it especially compelling. I'll tell you what happens in that case: the exact same thing that would happen if the Celtics build an offense around shooting skyhooks and the skyhooks don't fall. The exact same thing that would happen if the Celtics build an offense around shooting mid range pull ups and the mid range pull ups don't fall, etc. They lose.
If you want to win the NBA championship, you have to create good looks and you have to knock them down. Just because the Celtics had a series where they didn't do the latter doesn't necessarily mean that their offense is somewhat flawed and didn't deliver or more importantly won't deliver the former in the future.
(*) There might be a couple D'Antoni/Harden Rockets' team that meet that criteria. Even so, considering that it's the only team that offered any kind of resistance to the KD/Curry Warriors and would probably have gone all the way if they had merely faced a regular championship caliber team instead of the greatest team of the 21st century, I'm not sure it's supports your argument that a 48% 3PAr is an hindrance to post season success. I know, I know people are going to bring up the 27 misses in the row but people also conveniently forget that the Rockets had no business going 7 games against that team in the first place and the only reason they were in that position to begin with is because they tilted the math in their favor.
