The Boston Celtics are going to shoot the three-ball. It's a reality that fans and critics have come to terms with in a rarely harmonious manner. Boston, after all, ranked No. 4 in the NBA in three-point field goals attempted in 2025-26 and ranked No. 1 in 2023-24 and 2024-25.
With Jaylen Brown no longer on the roster, it's likely that the Celtics will go right back to the plan that's worked so well for them. The hurdle: It's more of a regular season strategy.
Clearly, Boston has proven itself as a championship-caliber team by winning the very title it was pursuing in 2024. It also dominated the Eastern Conference for the better part of a decade, all but bottoming out at a Conference Finals appearance.
Having made early exits from the playoffs in consecutive seasons, however, they can't simply stay the course and hope for different results.
Trading Brown seems to indicate that the Celtics will be going all-in on the three-ball. Paul George will replace Brown in the rotation and is a career 38.4 percent shooter from beyond the arc who seemingly fits the ideology of shooting with volume.
One simply can't help but point to the Celtics' past two postseason series as proof that they'll need to strike a healthier balance if they hope to make their elite regular season strategy translate again.
Celtics have every reason to rely on the 3—but it's a flawed approach
The Celtics went 61-21 in 2024-25, but met an early demise in the playoffs as they fell to the New York Knicks 4-2 in the second round. Boston also went 56-26 in 2025-26, only to fall 4-3 to the Philadelphia 76ers in the first round.
The steady theme in both of those series was that the Celtics failed to adapt when the three-ball went cold late in the series.
Boston shot 30.0 percent on threes in the decisive Game 6 against the Knicks, yet attempted 40 shots from beyond the arc. In an eerily similar decline in 2026, the Celtics shot 29.3 percent on 41 threes during Game 6 and 26.5 percent on 49 attempts in Game 7. All three of the aforementioned games were losses.
Whether fair or foul, that certainly implied that Boston was unwilling to adapt to the dire need to change their approach in order to alter their results.
With Brown out of the equation, however, the Celtics are down their most assertive midrange scorer. They've replaced him with another three-point shooter, who will play alongside Jayson Tatum in a starring role. Tatum, of course, has attempted 9.0 threes per game over the past five seasons.
The Celtics' three-point infatuation has proven to win regular season games, but if they continue to be as stubborn as before, the playoffs will end in a painfully familiar way.
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