Celtic Surge

(Sorry it's late today. I figured you'd rather read something interesting at 1:30 than a piece of crap at noon, and unfortunately that was the choice today. By the way, it's freezing down here. What is going on?)

The Boston Celtics, to the surprise of absolutely everyone, have started the year off at 17-8. They have the Eastern Conference's best record, which conjures up the improbable image of Boston lining up against Shaq and Kobe in the NBA Finals in June.

How is this happening? That's what I want to explore today.

First, let's look at the basics, and from there I'll dive into the nitty-gritty. The two basic measures I use for a team's performance are offensive efficiency and defensive efficiency. Here's how the Celtics compare with their 36-46 campaign of a year ago:

                  00-01   01-02
Off Efficiency    100.7   103.0
Def Efficiency    103.0    97.6

As you can see, they've made a step forward on offense, and a trampoline-aided launch forward on defense. Now let's look closer at how it's happened. I'll talk about the offensive improvement first, since that's the easier discussion (It's no fun boring everyone at once. I like to slowly weed out my crowd so that by the end I've discovered those with the greatest tolerance. The Feds pays me to do this; their software immediately targets the people who make it all the way to the end, and they are forced to proofread government documents).

The Celtics step forward has been largely attributed to Paul Pierce and Antoine Walker, based on the theory that they're the only two guys on this team that can play, so it must be something that they've done. But in reality, that isn't true. Here's the Celtic PERs for last year and this year (the league average is 15.00):

            00-01   01-02
Pierce      24.89   23.67
Walker      21.04   19.92
Anderson    13.61   14.90
Brown        5.87
Johnson             16.35
Battie      11.54   12.77
Blount       5.92    3.94
Palacio     13.75   12.51
Potapenko   11.19   12.53
Williams     8.48    6.03
Stith       12.49
Strickland          10.08

As you can see, Walker and Pierce have both actually dropped a bit. Walker in particular is launching as many ill-advised three-pointers as ever (in fact, probably more, and he's added a nice "go between the legs and then launch the contested three" move) but he isn't getting pasted in the press this season because the Celtics are winning.

You can see the PERs in the table above, but to give you the full picture of what happened I need to discuss minutes as well. Last year Boston gave over 1,000 minutes to two players - Mark Blount and Randy Brown - who were absolutely terrible. Both had PERs below six, and while each was a solid defender, there was no reason for them to be getting so much clock.

This season they've upgraded at point guard and center in part by simply not playing those two guys. Kenny Anderson and Milt Palacio aren't playing point guard any different than a year ago; they're simply playing it more. Same goes for Battie and Potapenko in the middle.

The one other improvement has been the arrival of Joe Johnson, who has given this team a desperately needed third guy that can make a shot consistently. Although he's dropped off from his torrid start, Johnson's 16.35 PER is bested only by Pau Gasol and Brendan Haywood in this year's rookie crop.

Yet I've only explained part of the story. Not sending dead weight onto the court and adding Johnson has improved the offense, but the major improvement in Boston's play this season has been on defense.

I've talked about New Jersey's improvement on defense in the wake of the Jason Kidd trade on a few different occasions, but Boston's improvement makes New Jersey's seem downright ordinary. They've gone from 20th in defensive efficiency to 4th, and the truly amazing thing is that they've done it with almost the exact same players.

In fact, even the minor roster changes don't explain anything. Bryant Stith was a defensive specalist; his replacement, Erick Strickland, is too. Joe Johnson is OK on D, but I haven't heard a lot of All-Defense talk, if you know what I mean. Finally, the two guys whose absence helped the offense so much -- Blount and Brown -- were only on the floor for their defense.

So why are they better? Let's break it down. There's basically two ways to stop somebody in basketball: Forcing a turnover, or forcing a missed shot and then getting the rebound. That leads to three elements of defense: Turnovers, Missed Shots, and Rebounds.

Turnovers aren't the answer. Last year the Celtics forced 15.4 turnovers per 100 possessions; this year they only force 14.5.

Missed Shots is measured best by points per shot attempt. Last year the Celtics gave up 1.092 points per shot attempt, the fourth worst total in the league. Only the unholy trinity of Chicago, Vancouver and Golden State were worse.

This year the Celtics give up just 1.017 points per shot attempt, tied for 8th best in the league. This represents a massive improvement; given that they've done it with the same players, it suggests more than anything that Jim O'Brien has gotten his team to be much more ferocious about challenging shots and staying in front of people (more on this below).

Rebounding is interesting as well. Despite a smallish team, the Celtics rebound 73.7% of opponents' misses, which is the third best figure in the league (oddly, the even more undersized Knicks are number one). But they were also pretty good last year, getting 72.7% of opponents' misses, which was tied for seventh.

So, summing it up then, the Celtics defensive improvement, which is the major cause of the improvement in their record, is a result not of forcing turnovers or rebounding, but merely from forcing much tougher shots for their opponents. Last year their opponents shot 46% from the field and 37% from three point range, and took almost 27 free throws a night. This year they're hitting 42%, 29% from downtown, and taking only 23 free throws a night.

The fact that Boston has made this improvement with almost entirely the same cast, and that the second biggest reason they've improved has been smarter use of their personnel (by not having Blount and Brown around to kill their offense), speaks volumes about Jim O'Brien.

I've had a theory for a long time that one of the best ways to see how well somebody can coach is to look at their defense, not their offense. I've always been amazed by the ability of guys like Pat Riley, Larry Brown and Jeff Van Gundy to win lots of games with teams that weren't really very impressive, just because their teams gave such a tremendous effort on defense. On the ever-expanding list called Hypotheses I Need to Do a Formal Study On, this one probably cracks the top ten.

O'Brien, so far, is a shining beacon for this theory, because with basically no difference in talent he's whipped his club into a frenzy on defense that has them challenging for the top spot in the conference. You've probably caught on already that I consider him the runaway choice for Coach of the Year, and hopefully the media will interrupt their Pierce/Walker lovefest to see things that way as well.

Pot Shots

I can't even believe that the Nets are whining about Kenyon Martin's suspension for his clothesline of Karl Malone Saturday. Ask almost any player what their greatest fear is, and they'll tell it's some guy they can't see clubbing them while they're going full speed on the fast break. It's the most dangerous play in the game, and this, "but Oakley didn't get suspended for his cheap shot" line from Jersey is completely beside the point ...

The Lakers put Shaquille O'Neal on the injured list yesterday, and if he stays there the rest of the season the playoffs could have some genuine drama ... Nobody's talking about them, but watch out for Seattle. They've had injuries to Calvin Booth, Vin Baker and Desmond Mason and have still gone 14-15 against what is probably the league's toughest schedule so far. If they can say close until Baker returns they could squeeze into a Western playoff spot.