hugepatsfan wrote:Did Brad fail in the White trade or is White failing to play well? There's a difference. If White just isn't capable of playing within our scheme then that's a Brad failure. If White is just shooting poorly, then that's kind of more on him. This wasn't a 1 year acquisition, so we'll see.
From what I see, White does everything within the system well. I genuinely feel like he's almost always making right decisions and either taking good shots or doing what needs to be done for someone else to get one. He's just shooting like absolute trash. There's no other way to put it - hot garbage. IDK, I still have pretty high confidence that it will be fine though. I don't think he's a great shooter, but he isn't a terrible one over his career either. I feel like over the long haul, water will find its level and he'll be fine.
I do think that this team needs another shooter/secondary ball handler. They need a guy who can bring what Pritchard does offensively, but in a body that they trust enough defensively to play extended minutes. Pritchard is only playing 11.4 minutes/game so far. They could really use a guy they trust to get that up to about 20. The extra spacing would make a nice difference. Should take a few minutes each from Smart and White to find those minutes.
Pritchard I feel should have ideally never have seen the court vs this Bucks team when Giannis is on the court at least. I was afraid, he would not be effective overall vs them. Not really his fault, just a bad matchup for him. Bucks have too much size in their frontcourt and Pritchard is too small/relatively slow to close out effectively on the Bucks shooters in transition.
Nesmith if he can gain his confidence back may actually be the answer but kind of hard to play him meaningful minutes at this time and expect him to be a very good 3 and D player off the bench. Against the Nets, Pritchard has a big penetration advantage over Nesmith since Nets rim protection was mediocre and Nesmith isn't a very good ball handler for a 2 guard. On the other hand, Nesmith is big enough if he gets the ball inside, he may be a little less intimidated shooting.
But against this team if Nesmith could be in the game with Horford/Tatum and Smart or White, it would actually work if he could just hit 3's and hustle back on defense. Those transition 3's that Pritchard really can't contest that well, may be contested better and Nesmith much more likely to get loose balls/defend and do better on switches.
If the Celtics feel as though Nesmith sucks and will continue to suck, they need to get a replacement with size ASAP since this could easily cost the Celtics the series.
Pritchard is a pretty smart driver of the basketball but the lane won't really open up for him against this team with Giannis in the game unless a bunch of other players and not just him get hot from 3 and Milwaukee has to change their base defense. I'm not counting on that happening.
The Celtics need to try to beat this team 102-95 which they are fully capable of doing instead of expecting to score a lot of points vs them which I doubt Boston can do on a consistent basis.
