Here are a few of the ways the Celtics picked apart the Mavericks - The Boston Globe (2024)

His response: “They shoot the ball a lot.”

Without question, Doncic and Irving are two of the best isolation scorers in the NBA. But on the way to a dominant Finals win, the Celtics basically dared them to be great.

During the regular season, Doncic and Irving were top 10 in isolation possessions (7.3 and 4.5, first and seventh respectively) and points per possession in isolation (1.09, sixth; 1.08, seventh).

The Mavericks largely hinged their playoff hopes on Doncic and Irving being able to carry them on offense — and for the most part it worked, even if it came at the expense of their efficiency. Doncic’s isolations dropped to 6 per game during the postseason and his efficiency dipped to 1.02. Irving’s iso’s ticked up to 5.5 per game, but those possessions became less likely to get the Mavericks a bucket (0.93).

The Celtics set the tone in the first two games by forcing Doncic and Irving to be scorers and taking away any other decisions they could make. Doncic isolated on 32 percent of his possessions against the Celtics, up from 23 in the regular season. Irving’s iso’s jumped from 21 percent of his possessions over the first three rounds of the playoffs to 35 percent in the Finals.

The results were performances that looked better on paper than in person. Doncic averaged 29.2 points, 8.8 rebounds, and 5.5 assists, but shot 24.4 percent on 3-pointers and turned the ball over 23 times in five games. Irving gave the Mavericks 19.8 points per game with a diet of mostly difficult shots.

“I can score 25 points,” Irving said, “but if I don’t, we’ve got to be able to pick each other up.”

▪ The Celtics can do almost anything on offense. The Celtics’ dogmatic approach to 3-point shooting since coach Joe Mazzulla took the reins overshadowed the fact that Mazzulla has gradually made the offense arguably the most diverse in the NBA.

They didn’t have two players who could play in isolation, they had four. They didn’t have two players who could handle the ball in the pick-and-roll, they had four. Two of the main players running the pick-and-roll (Derrick White and Jayson Tatum) also had no problem being the roller, along with Al Horford and Kristaps Porzingis. They had five guys eager to play in the post (Horford, Porzingis, Tatum, Jrue Holiday, and Jaylen Brown) and practically everyone on the floor could spot up and knock down an open three.

Mazzulla has been cast as narrow-minded other than 3-pointers, but he’s actually opened up a world of possibilities that makes the Celtics offense one of the most difficult to guard.

A year ago, the Heat stumped the Celtics by essentially daring them to take midrange jumpers. Brown and Tatum both dipped their toes, combining for 40 middies in the series. This year, they got comfortable there. Tatum was 25 of 67 from midrange, Brown 16 of 36.

▪ Jrue Holiday is a mutant. To that end, having a 6-foot-4-inch point guard that can stand in as a center is an anomaly. For all intents and purposes, Holiday played “big man” by hovering in the dunker spot by the basket on offense.

It allowed the Celtics to maintain the spacing they needed to punish the Mavericks at the rim, and it also forced the Mavericks into losing matchups and left them compromised in help situations.

Whenever the Celtics needed it, Holiday found a way to sew a solid possession together by being a proxy roll man, using well-timed craft cuts to finish dump off passes, posting up, spotting up or cleaning up possessions with putbacks.

Oh, and he also guarded nearly everyone the Mavericks put on the floor (somehow A.J. Lawson avoided him).

▪ No threes, no lobs, no service. When the Mavericks went all of Game 1 without being able to find a lob or a decent corner 3-pointer, they knew they were in trouble.

A team that led the league in corner three during the regular season could only manage 26 looks from the corners in the Finals. As much as the Mavericks depend on Doncic and Irving, they need open 3-pointers for their offense to thrive.

Throughout the playoffs, the Mavericks leaned on P.J. Washington (29 of 75), Derrick Jones Jr. (18 of 41), and Josh Green (16 of 42) to be outlets for Doncic and Irving. Over the first two games of the Finals, they got six looks combined from the corner. For the series, they shot 6 of 17 (mostly thanks to Green’s 4 for 6).

Washington, Green, and Jones are capable corner shooters. But the issue is if they have to drive above the break, things get dicey. They shot a combined 9 for 29 from above the break. And that left Kidd scrambling for alternatives off the bench such as Tim Hardaway Jr., who had played mostly inconsequential minutes after the first round but still shot 4 for 6 on above-the-break threes.

By forcing that group to be Dallas’s shot-makers, the Celtics turned one of the Mavericks’ strengths into a glaring weakness.

▪ Payton Pritchard at the buzzer. Any time anyone drills a long-range heave at the buzzer, luck is generally on their side. So imagine doing it twice in the same series.

Pritchard is that guy. After one warm-up heave from 30 feet in the first round against Miami and another from 84 feet in the conference finals against Indiana, Pritchard finally found his rhythm.

He cashed in a 34-footer at the end of the third quarter of Game 2 against the Mavericks. Then he made magic happen again from 49 feet at the halftime buzzer of Game 5.

Pritchard doesn’t just make shots, Mazzulla said, he makes moments.

“I think he won us moments,” Mazzulla said. “As the playoffs go on, obviously some patterns change and things change, but those guys have to win moments of games for you, and Payton did that twice for us. That is just as important as any other plays that happened throughout the series and in the playoffs alone.”

Those moments don’t come around often. Since 1997, as far back as Basketball-Reference’s shot finder goes, the only other player to knock down two 30-plus-footers at the end of a quarter in the same playoff series was Terrence Ross, who cashed in twice for the Magic against one of his former teams, the Raptors, in 2019.

Julian Benbow can be reached at julian.benbow@globe.com.