March 29, 2025
Jayson Tatum nearly posted a triple-double and Luke Kornet had his best game of the season as the Celtics won their eighth game in a row on Saturday, beating the Spurs 121-111.
Here are the takeaways.
After Tatum’s brief injury scare against the Kings, he returned to the lineup on Saturday and looked every bit as dominant as he had before he sat out.
Tatum, as he tends to do this season, worked his way into the game. He scored a layup early and buried a deep 3-pointer, but he once again looked content to play a supporting role as the Celtics racked up a nine-point lead in the first quarter.
As a game wears on, Tatum tends to wear down opponents, and the Spurs were no exception. Devin Vassell is a good defender who drew the Tatum assignment often, but he’s not strong enough to keep Tatum out of the paint, and his only hope was to disrupt Tatum’s dribble (which he did a few times). The Celtics star got downhill repeatedly, and he scored one of his better moves off the bounce in transition in the second half — euro-stepping his way to a basket with Manu Ginobili in attendance for Saturday’s game.
Tatum is playing the game entirely at his own speed. In halfcourt sets, he knows precisely what works. He’s fine spamming the same play over and over in half-court sets even if it doesn’t always boost his box-score stats, but more often than not, it does boost his box-score stats in the end. He’s fine picking up the opponent’s best player defensively. He’s fine getting out in transition. He’s fine pulling up from three.
“Just taking what the defense gives him, being proactive,” Joe Mazzulla said. “He’s doing a great job playing with pace, reading the 2-on-1s, knowing when to bait the 2-on-1, when not to. Just doing a great job reading the game, surveying the game. He continues to get better.”
We’ve said it before this season, but it bears repeating: Tatum is not an MVP candidate this year (nor should he be), but as he enters his prime, he’s showing the blueprint for a player who could mount a serious MVP campaign at some point in the future.
Speaking of MVPs, let’s talk about Luke Kornet.
The Celtics overwhelmed the Spurs with their size from the start of the game – Jeremy Sochan is an admirable player but no match for Kristaps Porzingis.
The Celtics’ advantage was most stark, however, in the third quarter when Kornet completely took over the game. Kornet dominated the Spurs in the paint, catching multiple lobs from driving guards.
Kornet was also able to help himself and his teammates to several second-chance points — he set a career-high by pulling down 16 rebounds, including seven offensive. The Celtics were able to throw shots at the rim with plenty of confidence knowing that Kornet would be able to go track them down and finish them off if they missed.
Kornet finished with 15 points, 16 rebounds and four assists in 31 minutes of action, and he was a team-high +21 in a game the Celtics won by 10.
The Celtics have been messing with double-big lineups frequently for the last month or so, and with Al Horford sidelined on Saturday due to a toe issue, the Porzingis-Kornet two-man lineup got a closer look.
Kornet-Porzingis hasn’t gotten as much run as Kornet-Horford, which — according to Cleaning the Glass — has outscored opponents by 13 points per 100 possessions in 706 possessions this season. But Kornet-Porzingis might be even more high-potential as a pairing: Their lineups are outscoring opponents by 21.8 points per 100 possessions this season, including a 99th percentile 127.4 points scored and 105.5 points given up per 100.
On Saturday, Kornet and Porzingis together were even more devastating than usual against a Spurs team whose tallest rotation player was Sandro Mamukelashvili, a 6-foot-9 bench forward who played 16 minutes. The Spurs struggled to navigate the waving arms of both 7-footers, and they struggled to rebound.
Other teams will have more answers than the Spurs, but the Celtics look really good when they have multiple bigs on the floor.
“It just gives us a different identity. It gives us a presence offensively and forces the other team to match up with us differently than they would have if only one of them was out there,” Mazzulla said. “They’re both dynamic defensively in their own way. KP’s rim protection, Luke’s ability to navigate different matchups and different coverages. So it just gives us something different, but I enjoy watching those two play.”
Last year, Jrue Holiday managed to carry a seemingly unsustainable 3-point percentage the entire way through the season and into the playoffs.
This season, Holiday has struggled a bit — shooting 33.5 percent from deep, which is more than nine percent worse than last year’s lofty 42.9 percent mark.
In the last five games, however, Holiday is shooting 44.4 percent. On Saturday, he was 5-for-7 and scored 21 points — his latest in a series of impressive games that come as the Celtics seem to be putting everything together at precisely the right time.
Holiday is something of a luxury on this team — an overqualified role player who seems to be more than willing to play his role on a team full of stars. When he scores at a high clip, the Celtics are borderline unbeatable: They are 26-3 this season when he reaches double figures, and one of the losses was the bizarre game against the Grizzlies when the now-fired Taylor Jenkins successfully dared Holiday to try to beat them and he went 8-for-26.
“If I score then everybody will score,” Holiday said. “It’s just going to make our team that much better. I do hear it sometimes, not to pass up 3s or not pass up shots, but for the most part, I think I do my best and try to be aggressive.”
On a night when no player was singularly great (with the exception of Kornet), the Celtics got contributions up and down the roster — Tatum and Holiday were the only two to top 20, while Jaylen Brown added 14, Derrick White scored 13, and both Porzingis and Hauser added 11.
Brown recently told reporters he was dealing with a knee issue for the first time in his career, and he didn’t look particularly comfortable on Saturday. At one point in the first half, he went down and needed to take his time getting back up, which was a bit concerning, and he certainly didn’t look like he had his usual pop getting up and down the floor.
At the risk of stating the obvious, Brown is essential to the Celtics’ playoff hopes. He has played 59 games this season now — six short of the qualification for All-NBA — with eight games remaining. If he went scoreless but played in each of the next six games, he would still finish the season averaging more than 20 points per game, which is not to say Mazzulla should play him two minutes per game and bench him the rest of the way (right?), but rather is just to say that the Celtics probably don’t need to overtax him before the end of the season.
“You trust him. You trust the sports science team. You trust the trainers,” Mazzulla said. “He takes care of his body, and he’s doing everything he can to be available and he takes pride in that. Just constant communication and constant trust with him and with the staff.”
Scheierman is a rookie who spent much of the season in the G-League and shouldn’t get playoff minutes, but it was notable that in a game when the Celtics were without Payton Pritchard and Horford, he was the only player outside the regular rotation to get minutes. He made a pair of 3-pointers on Saturday, including this no-dip Sam Hauser Special from the corner.
Scheierman scored seven points and dished out a pair of assists in 19 minutes.
The Celtics, who have now won eight games in a row, have a chance to put together a perfect six-game road trip on Monday when they take on the Grizzlies at 7:30 p.m. They will take on the Heat in their return to TD Garden on Wednesday.
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