Cleaning out the New Year’s Celtics notebook as Boston flips its calendar to 2025:
The Celtics got Jrue Holiday back Tuesday after a three-game absence, and the veteran guard made an immediate impact. He swiped three steals and enjoyed his most efficient 3-point shooting performance of the season, going 4-for-5 from deep (including a first-half buzzer-beater) in Boston’s 125-71 evisceration of the Toronto Raptors.
Holiday joked that the right shoulder impingement that sidelined him for the previous week might have fixed his shooting form. The 34-year-old came in shooting 32.6% from three, down more than 10 percentage points from his career-best 42.9% last season. He’s especially struggled on corner threes, his success rate on those cut in half from 61.9% to 30.8%.
Holiday’s greatest strength is his defense — teammate Payton Pritchard called him “one of the best, if not the best all-time on-ball guard defenders that I’ve seen” — but the Celtics are a much more dangerous team when he’s shooting the ball as well as he did Tuesday.
“Maybe the hit is what helped it,” Holiday said after the game. “Maybe it got my shoulder in line and now I can see three or two go in. It felt good. I think just obviously basketball’s a physical sport, and being hit a couple times today, a couple times felt good, a couple times hurt. But we’ll manage.”
How well he manages will be an important factor moving forward. Holiday admitted his injury hadn’t fully healed and “probably” will linger, and the Celtics will want to avoid overburdening their second-oldest player ahead of what they hope is another long playoff run.
Speaking of injuries, it’s worth reiterating that the Celtics still have not played a full game with all eight of their core rotation players, and that their preferred starting five has played just 85 minutes together this season — 5.3% of the team’s total.
It would be very surprising if Tatum (five straight All-Star selections) or Brown (two straight; three in the last four years) were not selected. Holiday likely has the longest All-Star odds of the four, as his contributions are less tangible and he doesn’t have gaudy counting stats.
The most interesting candidate, then, is White, who is the only member of Boston’s top six (which also includes Kristaps Porzingis and Al Horford) who’s never made an All-Star team. The eighth-year pro shed his “unheralded role player” label during last year’s playoff run and is off to the best start of his career, on pace for career highs in points and rebounds while continuing to block more shots than most centers.
Only five NBA players have tallied 500-plus points, 125-plus rebounds, 35-plus blocks and 30-plus steals this season, and just two of them are guards: MVP candidate Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and White. Tatum (third), White (eighth) and Brown (T-10th) all rank in the top 10 in the league in plus/minus.
Official prediction: White gets in, giving the Celtics three All-Stars for the first time since 2011 (Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett, Ray Allen and Rajon Rondo).
Some have advocated for Pritchard to join the Celtics’ All-Star contingent. That’s not likely to happen — it’s exceedingly difficult for even the best bench players to earn All-Star nods — but the backup guard is running away with the NBA’s Sixth Man of the Year Award.
Pritchard has scored 517 points this season, 99 more than any other NBA reserve. He’s third among bench players in assists, seventh in steals and second in plus/minus. He’s also been one of the league’s best and most prolific 3-point shooters, starters included, ranking sixth in 3-point attempts and fourth in makes. Of the 25 players attempting more than 7.5 threes per game, only the Clippers’ Norman Powell has a better shooting percentage than Pritchard’s 42.5%.
After scuffling through a mini-slump before Christmas (3-for-19 from three over three games), Pritchard returned to form over the past week, shooting 53.8% from deep (14-for-26) over Boston’s last three contests. The latest odds from DraftKings Sportsbook pegged him as a heavy -200 favorite for Sixth Man of the Year, well ahead of second-place De’Andre Hunter of Atlanta (+300).
“If I get voted for that and I get that honor, that would be incredible, but I’m not going to chase it and go try to get stats,” Pritchard, the only Celtic to appear in every game this season, said in late November. “It’s more about playing winning basketball. And if I’m fortunate enough to win it through that, then that would be an honor.”
The Celtics’ record in the month of December: 8-6, good for 14th in the NBA and seventh in the Eastern Conference. And that was despite playing 10 of their 14 games at home and having one 11-day stretch with just two games thanks to their early exit from the NBA Cup.
January will be much more challenging from a schedule perspective. It features two Western Conference road trips, with the first beginning Thursday night in Minnesota and winding through Houston (Friday), Oklahoma City (Sunday) and Denver (next Tuesday). Two weeks later, they’ll hit California (Golden State on Jan. 20, Los Angeles Clippers on Jan. 22, Los Angeles Lakers on Dec. 25) before visiting Dallas for an NBA Finals rematch on Jan. 25.
During those two trips, the Celtics will face the teams ranked first, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth and 10th in the West standings as of Wednesday. They’ll play three back-to-backs this month, will get just two two-day breaks and won’t have three consecutive days off until All-Star weekend in mid-February.
It’ll be a prime opportunity for the defending champs to prove they’re still the NBA’s top dogs.
“As a competitor, this is going to be a great challenge,” Pritchard said. “Really looking forward to it. We play a lot of good opponents. This isn’t like necessarily the championship, but it’s preparing for it. Moments like this, you’ve got to go to war and get better. Hopefully, we win every game. But if we lose, it’s preparation. It’s building for what’s to come in the future.
“It’s going to be a really good test for us, and we’re going to go out there and compete.”