Boston Celtics: Brad Stevens’ Cheeky Four Guard Lineups

Brad Stevens got creative with a four guard lineup against the Utah Jazz

The Boston Celtics loss to the Utah Jazz can only be described as unfortunate for all parties involved. Rudy Gobert suffered an injury that will keep him sidelined for a month, Derrick Favors left the game early, and the Celtics still front-rimmed their way to a loss.

Daniel Theis broke his nose in the process, leaving the Celtics without yet another bruiser while they face yet another back-to-back in their schedule. I’m not going to dwell on the results of a game where about one third of the core players between the two rosters are injured, but instead I want to focus on Brad’s super-small lineup that almost got Boston back in the game.

Semi Ojeleye playing some minutes at the five. Celtics have four point guards on the court. Brad is insane.
— Jay King (@ByJayKing) December 16, 2017

I don’t mean to put Mr. King on blast, but there’s some method to Brad’s madness that may have flown under everybody’s radar when he put four guards on the court.

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Remember when Isaiah Thomas scored 53 point in a playoff game? That was in the second game in a second-round series against Washington. The Wizards blitzed Thomas on both ends if they could manage it, by forcing mismatches to shoot over him on one end, as well as double teams to force the ball out of his hand on the other.

In that game, Brad went to a four-guard lineup in the third quarter made up of Isaiah Thomas, Avery Bradley, Terry Rozier, Marcus Smart, and Al Horford. That lineup went +3 over a four minute, eighteen second stretch in a game that went down to the wire, and ended in overtime.

Naturally, there won’t be a huge scoring difference in a 53-minute game of trading buckets, but this kind of lineup was a matchup nightmare for Washington, or more specifically, Marcin Gortat. Every switch the Celtics forced put Gortat on a much quicker player, and time and time again he was caught in between not knowing whether to close out on the perimeter, or fade back to put a body on Horford. Being caught in no man’s land is essentially becoming a traffic cone on defense, and the Celtics exploited him to win a crucial playoff game.

Looking back at the Jazz game, you’ll see that Kyrie Irving was getting double-teamed far beyond the three point line by Ricky Rubio and whatever wing Utah had on the floor at the time. Late in the game, Stevens tried to counter this strategy with a lineup of Smart, Rozier, and Larkin working the backcourt with Irving, while Ojeleye and Brown (both 6’7″) took turns as biggest Celtic on the court.

Plenty of scoring opportunities presented themselves, but the Celtics were -2 overall for their four-minute experiment. While every shot hit the front of the rim, the Celtics did put a quick run together to trim a 15-ish point deficit down to nine, before getting buried by two three-pointers by Donovan Mitchell. Oh well.

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I’d love to see the Celtics go back to that lineup in the future, but with Horford as the lone big man on the court. I think the ‘micro-ball’ strategy is great with him, as I can hardly think of another guard/big man combo that Irving and Horford wouldn’t be able to out-wit while three other defenders desperately chase Smart, Rozier, and Larkin around the perimeter. I’m sure we’ll see it eventually, as nothing is off limits in Brad’s playbook.