All that really matters for him is positioning and bball IQ. Most teams don't want those types of bigs taking jumpers ever. 15-footers don't do much for your spacing, and it's VERY hard for a big to make them efficiently enough to be worth it.
2023-24 Celtics
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They have Queta under control. No need to upgrade him from a two-way contract and lose an asset. Kornet knows the system and Queta is still learning.
Maybe if they want him to play in the playoffs they'll upgrade him but as for now, they'll have him on shuttle and call him up when Al is resting.
Maybe if they want him to play in the playoffs they'll upgrade him but as for now, they'll have him on shuttle and call him up when Al is resting.
Catching up on preseason tape this morning and as others have said, Queta is probably the biggest surprise of the camp to me. If the game has truly slowed down for him, and it not just be preseason intensity, to where he continues not being a fouling machine we may have something. Perimeter footwork will always be an issue but it seems like he is a hard worker in making improvements everywhere.
It looked like he was really locked in on being in the right position on both ends of the floor. I liked his defensive awareness. On offense, he set picks out top pretty well, and did a good job rolling. In the paint, he showed a nose for the ball, and some savvy on one play when he had position on his defender and laid a wicked box out on him for an offensive board and put back. He seems to be able to control the ball with one hand and take it strong to the rim. Charlotte is trash, but he’s been productive all preseason. As the new play by play guy mentioned, his numbers per 100 possessions are something like plus50.
These live bodied athletic seven footers who don’t treat the ball like a hand grenade when it’s thrown to them really just need to understand their responsibilities and play hard, and there will be opportunity to thrive on this talent laden team. Plenty of space out there on offense. Defensively, there are two strong examples on what the big needs to do, in AL and KP. So far, so good with Queta.
View: https://twitter.com/ShamsCharania/status/1715377766084800711
Gabriel waived. Not a big surprise, Queta passed him and they probably want to keep the roster at 14 to start the season.
Gabriel waived. Not a big surprise, Queta passed him and they probably want to keep the roster at 14 to start the season.
I was watching some of the game last night and loved seeing one possession with either entirely reserves or one starter mixed in. The ball was zipped around the perimeter, into the post and back out, etc. and wound up with Svi in the corner for an open three. Excellent unselfish play throughout the roster, which is evidence that the coaching staff has made everyone comfortable with their roles and they don't need to do it themselves out there. Even Pritchard who seems overqualified as a pure "B" squad player, backed off on his FG attempts last night and distributed to the tune of 8 assists.
Two biggest surprises of camp to me were Queta and Pritchard. Preseason caveats aside, I'm starting to think that an order of crow is in my future, as the latter seems to have made material advances in athleticism and court awareness. The former seems to have had something click mentally. Maybe this defensive system is good for Queta, not sure. But man does he seem to read actions well. And Pritchard seems to have a comfort level with the ball even against regulars and was looking for teammates (and succeeding in getting them looks). I'm super encouraged that the regular season depth will be plenty, and I can now imagine PP getting playoff minutes.
PP's biggest issue to me is that shooters basically ignore as his physical limitations makes it almost impossible for him to challenge shots. Particularly against NYK, I noticed that the Knick shooters were very comfortable shooting over PP.
It's not going to be a big deal in the regular season but it'll be hard to overcome in the post-season.
It'll be one shooter. I'm encouraged that he seems more resistant to being ragdolled and blown past. If he can keep most 1s in front of him by moving his feet and holding fast, then yes, an opponent can work switches and get strong wings to try to back him down. Then it'll be up to the staff to concoct a series of rotations to get him blindside help and such. It's less than ideal (you don't have to do that shit for Jrue), but being able to stay in front of dudes is progress. He's never going to be a good matchup for wings or powerful 1s like Brunson. It'll be somewhat matchup dependent.
I guess, but there are plenty of guys with similar wingspan+height challenges who have stayed on the floor in the biggest games. Lowry and Vanvleet come to mind immediately.
Obviously PP needs to be really productive on offense for it to make sense to have him out there, but he has enough strength that he can probably get to kinda passable on D with work/emphasis.
If past experience holds, teams are going to repeatedly test him when he checks in. The lineups they use around him during the regular season will be telling in terms of what we might expect out of him in the playoffs or if you can feel at all comfortable using him in certain situations.
It would be nice if he shows enough resistance such that he gets the Hauser treatment (targeting teams relented against him when it wasn't working as the season went on) but as wbcd notes his height is always going to be a limiting factor.
Oh no doubt, and I'm not trying to discount what he's saying. Frankly, I can't even believe what I'm typing.
I guess what I mean is that I saw a guy entering the year who was basically good at two things (long range bombing and ballhandling) and weak at almost everything else (assists, man defense, team defense, smurfy). If he has improved at all of the other things except being smurfy, for me he goes from "I can't ever play this guy in the playoffs if everyone else is healthy" to "in the right lineups, against the right opponents, he can get playoff minutes and help".
We don't even have to reach as far as Lowry and VanVleet (two absolute bricks defensively) to find successful playoff teams playing short point guards effectively in the postseason. The Celtics have made deep playoff runs in recent history with Isaiah Thomas and Kemba Walker (both negative defenders that are shorter and lighter than Pritchard) playing 35+ mpg. There's good reason to think the Celtics can have a defense that allows him to still play 10-20 mpg in the playoffs without negatively impacting the game too much.
The last couple years have been nice with no one in our playoff rotation that can be consistently bullied (or flat out ignored) by bigger players, but it's not the only way to win.
I am open minded about his upside too. The skills, energy and work ethic all appear to be there - can he and the team find ways to minimize his flaws? If so, its a positive development in terms of this team's potential window.
Right, the reason I mentioned Lowry and FVV is that, physically, they're actually fairly similar to PP. Almost identical dimensions, strong, not very athletic (Fred is famously challenged at rim finishing). And they are good at defense.
IT and Kemba, by contrast, were huge liabilities.
Clearly Kyle and Fred are FAR better defenders than PP, but my point is that they wouldn't be if "oh you can just shoot over them and they can't bother your shot because they're short with short wingspans" were the end of the story for guys with that physical profile.
PP seems to me to be at least a couple of notches below FVV and Lowry as a defender. I mean FVV did a pretty good job on Curry during the Finals; I don't think PP is ever going to be able to do that.
But hopefully PP's defense is impactful enough to stay on the floor. That's always been the biggest concern.
edit: posted this before I saw your reply above. If PP can bother shooters like FVV and Lowry, that would be great. But I don't think he's shown that yet.
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Except that the Celts couldn't solve what to do when Butler did this to EVERYONE, except for maybe JT and TL.
Jimmy averaged 24.7 ppg and shot .420 from the field against Boston in that series. He was pretty unremarkable after game 2 (under 40% for the rest of the series), other than that killer stretch in game 6 when he scored 15 points in the 4th quarter. It wasn't Jimmy Butler that the Celtics couldn't solve, it was how to keep the rest of the team from shooting 45% from 3 on 26 attempts per game. Once he stopped hitting contested mid-range jumpers he was very ordinary.
There's this odd blind spot with Butler where everyone remembers when he plays great (37.6 ppg on .597 shooting against Milwaukee) and forgets when he's just ok (23.8 ppg on .421 shooting for the rest of the playoffs). I'm really not sure why. He's very good on the margins (good to great defensively and good ball security) but when he doesn't have a mismatch and his mid-range jumper isn't going down, he disappears.
I discussed this ad nauseum throughout the entire playoffs here and with @Brand Name on how Butler's ability to get to his spot and draw defenders freed up the highest quality catch and shoots you can create. Butler carried the Heat with his creation for others as well as getting to the line.....and using FG% as an efficiency tool is like c'mon really. You know this.
FG% is pretty basic, I used it only because it's quick and easy to calculate. You can toss in scoring efficiency numbers that include FT%, it won't change the story all that much (because he isn't as good a 3 point shooters as most other high volume wings). His TS% against Boston in that series was a pretty mediocre .519, especially compared with Tatum (.588) and how he played earlier in the playoffs against Milwaukee (.671). Butler was the reincarnation of Jordan against the Bucks, but against the Celtics he was far more ordinary. Butler's late game efficiency was a huge part of why they won 1 and 2 (and almost stole 6), but ultimately Miami beat Boston because their 3 point shooters shot out of their minds on wide open 3s, and Boston underperformed in that regard.
In the regular season, the Heat (outside of Butler) shot .343 from 3. Against Boston and excluding Butler, they shot .445 from 3. They shot more than 100 points better from 3, with the only real personnel difference being that they were missing Herro, who had been by far their best 3 point shooter during the regular season. That's mind boggling, and doesn't have much to do with Butler (especially because we were rarely doubling him). Miami shot an insane 58% on wide open 3 pointers during that series, the best of any series (by several points) in the last decade. Jimmy was far less efficient a scorer in that series than he had been for the entire regular season (.647 TS% in the regular season), yet the guys around him performed far better than in the regular season. Why?
Meanwhile, Boston shot over 70 points worse from 3 (.377 down to .303) in that series compared to their regular season numbers. It's infuriating to say that sometimes it's just a make or miss league, but...sometimes it is. Butler wasn't this unstoppable force against Boston, and he wasn't the biggest reason why they lost.
Tatum 28/9/6.6 on a 62% TS
Jaylen 24/6/3 on a 61% TS
Kristaps 20/8/2 on a 64% TS
Jrue 15/6/6 on a 59% TS
Derrick 14/4/5 on a 63% TS
61-21
Jaylen 24/6/3 on a 61% TS
Kristaps 20/8/2 on a 64% TS
Jrue 15/6/6 on a 59% TS
Derrick 14/4/5 on a 63% TS
61-21
I was repeating this in Silver Dollar as I was riding the Heat all through those early rounds. It was simple to me then and it remains so....the Heat shooters were not getting the same rhythm looks during the regular season when it was one pass, shoot, swing around perimeter, shoot, with no inside/out dribble penetration and no rhythm. That changed early on in the playoffs when Butler was collapsing defenses all game. Sure they overperformed in that series at 58% but to say that Miami was full of bad shooters during the regular season is a terrible evaluation of those players imo.
I'll buy that to a degree, but they went from 27th in 3p% in the regular season to 1st in the playoffs (and btw, they shot just .360 outside of the Boston series). Maybe they weren't full of bad shooters in the regular season (basically their entire rotation declined from 2022 to 2023 from behind the arc, so could just be some extremely bad variance), but there was nothing to indicate they were about to lead the league. Again, this happened while losing arguably their best 3 point shooter in game 1 of the playoffs. Even taking into account his insane Milwaukee series, Butler's playoff run wasn't materially different form how he performed in the regular season (on a minute by minute basis, it was actually slightly worse). Per 36 minutes, he averaged 24.7/6.3/5.7 with a TS% of .647 in the regular season. In the playoffs per 36, he averaged 24.4/5.8/5.3 with a TS% of .565.
I didn't watch a ton of Miami games during the regular season beyond when they played the Celtics, so maybe I'm just missing something - if Butler's overall performance was [statistically] very similar to how he played in the regular season, why did the players around him get so much better in the playoffs? Why didn't those rhythm looks exist in the regular season when he was actually playing more efficient offensively, and alongside another high volume moderately efficient player in Herro? There were some that tried to explain away Miami's poor performance in the regular season on injuries, but that never really made sense. Butler/Bam/Herro combined to miss 40 games last year, which is fewer than in 2022 (67) and fewer than in 2021 (56). Maybe Herro was the problem all along, in which case Miami is truly fucked by not swapping him out for Lillard.
The entire basis for my position was that this was not how Butler played during the regular season nor how Miami's offense executed. The offense actually ran through Herro often or with Lowry pounding and passing to someone coming off a screen for a contested 3 with the clock winding down. In the playoffs, it was Butler initiating the majority of the sets and while the "stats" looked similar they lied in that they didn't tell the entire story about Jimmy breaking down the defense which led to the ball movement and swing passes for open 3's in rhythm.
Lots of material for the Celtics’ media department. This has been an amazing off season. Stevens and ownership should get kudos for not being afraid to make big, costly moves to make their team better. I haven’t been this excited to see a Celtics team since KG was traded here. Jaylen working out with Tatum and Drew Hanlen, with Paul Pierce in the building? That’s the collab I’ve been waiting for.
One of the many things I like about the Jays is they are so humble for NBA superstars. Tatum, one of the best handful of players in the league, will accept tutelage from Pierce without hesitation. Brown, on the day he signed the biggest contract in NBA history, shared that moment with children from the community, and icon John Carlos.
Time for the Jays to get a banner.
I don't think Butler was collapsing much of anything for that Celtics series. Go back and rewatch. Vincent and Martin especially were making a lot of shit happen on their own. Hell, I thought Duncan Robinson had some games warping the defense more than Jimmy.
People shat their pants because that one game we didn't send extra help to Butler. They stuck with that strategy and it worked pretty well, just everyone else was shooting like prime Larry Bird.
If that’s correct, I have to think back to Butler’s podcast with JJR where Butler criticized Brett Brown because Brown ran the offense through Simmons all year but in the middle of the playoffs wanted it through Jimmy. Now, Spoelstra>Brown, so I’m sure the dynamics aren’t identical, but I just thought it was interesting to note.
In addition, MIA shot 34.3% from 3P against DEN and 30.6% from 3P against NYK. I didn't watch the NYK series and only parts of the DEN series but Lowe has said on a couple of occasions that MIA's 3P shooting against MIL and BOS was "historic" given their regular season.
It doesn't take anything away from Butler or MIA to say that they went on a historic bender from 3P land. It was going to happen at some point and it just sucks that it happened against BOS (although I think an equally historic event would have occurred if JT hadn't had that mis-step on the 1st BOS possession).
But if there are any silver linings, it's that it incentivized POBOS to get KP. And then Jrue.
Celtics were 61/189 on open/wide open 3s. Miami was 63/137. I don't know what Miami or Boston should have shot, but that difference was a large element of that series. I suppose you could argue the Miami shots were more in rhythm than the Celtics shots, but looking back I don't see that on film. People will probably have to agree to disagree there and come to their own conclusions. I think fatigue was probably a factor.
Butler was injured and I don't think was quite as effective as I've seen him in past series (that standard is very, very high to be fair). I think Adebayo was actually maybe the bigger issue, even though that really only showed up statistically in a few games. The Celtics really weren't handling his DHO game particularly well, and especially in game 2 (where the series really turned) I felt Adebayo was incredible passing the ball.
Even with all that said, Butler was 43/15 A/TO and shot 54 free throws. Even if he had a 52% TS (which is poor), he was still very, very good in that series.
Butler was injured and I don't think was quite as effective as I've seen him in past series (that standard is very, very high to be fair). I think Adebayo was actually maybe the bigger issue, even though that really only showed up statistically in a few games. The Celtics really weren't handling his DHO game particularly well, and especially in game 2 (where the series really turned) I felt Adebayo was incredible passing the ball.
Even with all that said, Butler was 43/15 A/TO and shot 54 free throws. Even if he had a 52% TS (which is poor), he was still very, very good in that series.
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View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3l6H393x3To
Bill with PP as a 6th Man of the Year candidate, sigh...
Bill with PP as a 6th Man of the Year candidate, sigh...
Nekias Duncan from the Dunc’d on podcast has also mentioned PP as a possible candidate.
I don’t see it lol, but he does look improved. People keep saying he looks faster, but to me it looks more like he’s really improved on his move set. A bunch of counters and such, as opposed to just dribbling to try to create a three.
Did he say 6th man? I think PP has a pretty good shot at being 8th Man of the Year.
While he does show up on Dunc’d On, Nekias podcast is “The Dunker Spot”. The Duncan of Dunc’d On is Nate. I have no idea which one mentioned PP as a candidate.
Bill is about the biggest PP fan around. Brings him up a lot (to the point he gets made fun of for it on other Ringer pods)
Yeah that’s my bad lol, I strongly dislike Nate Duncan’s podcast, as they are all pretentious pricks.
Dunker Spot miles ahead, which JJ Reddick caught onto.
I’m not a huge Dunkers Spot fan but I understand the appeal.
However, you’re 10000000% correct about Dunc’d On. It’s people acting like they’re incredibly smart and making unassailable points…that are often completely wrong
I remember listening to Nate Duncan eviscerate Danny Ainge for trading out of the number one pick and getting the future Kings pick for picking Tatum at #3 instead of #1. Even I could tell that was a great move at the time and it took Duncan years to reluctantly admit that he was wrong.
I started listening to him some time ago. At the time, He and Danny Leroux were taking about what a sunk cost Marcus Smart was and how he would either be non-tendered and allowed to walk as an FA or traded for a “fake” 2nd round pick. I knew at that point they had no fucking clue what they were talking about, despite how confident they sounded
