Dan Devine Senior writer Tue, November 10, 2026 at 3:59 PM UTC · 11 min read About Our Ads Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Despite having Jayson Tatum for a grand total of 522 minutes during the 2025-26 regular season, the Boston Celtics won nearly 70% of their games, finished in the top five in the NBA in both offensive and defensive efficiency , and landed the No. 2 seed in the Eastern Conference. They reached that level of success thanks, in large part, to Tatum's longtime running mate Jaylen Brown turning in the finest individual season of his career en route to a sixth-place finish in MVP voting and an All-NBA Second Team selection.
After that, though, the Celtics traded Brown to the Philadelphia 76ers this summer — a move that you might have heard just a teensy bit about over the past five months, and that has been driving no small amount of conversation ahead of the first meeting of the season between Boston and Philly on Tuesday night.
Since that tectonic roster shift, as they seek to chart a new path forward with a shuffled-up rotation and without a franchise cornerstone, the Celtics have … won 80% of their games, rank in the top seven in the NBA in both offensive and defensive efficiency , and sit in the No. 2 seed in the Eastern Conference.
The more things change, the more they stay the same?
This, to some degree, was the bet that Brad Stevens made when he made the decision to move Brown for Paul George, two first-round picks and two second-round picks. In the longer term, exchanging Brown — who has three years and $185 million remaining on his contract, and is also in line for an extension — for George — who makes less this season , has a player option for next season, and comes off the books one year earlier — tidies up the Celtics' balance sheet moving forward, potentially putting them in better position to remain competitive in the race for the top of the East several years down the line. (Say it with me, Brad: "optionality!" )
In the here-and-now, though, Stevens wagered that, as excellent as Brown was last season and as vital as he's been to the Celtics' perennial success for the past decade, the surrounding talent and head coach Joe Mazzulla's system would provide enough insulation to ensure that the team wouldn't skip too many beats without Brown. Through 10 games, at least? Boston looks pretty right about that.
The Celtics enter Tuesday's heavyweight battle with the Sixers looking broadly like the same elite squad they were last season. On offense, they sit in or near the top 10 in points scored and allowed per possession, and both team effective field goal percentage and opponents' eFG%. They're great at both avoiding turnovers and forcing them. They grab a ton of offensive rebounds and defend without fouling. They still jack a ton of 3s and make 'em at a top-10 clip, and still give up a ton of 3s in favor of protecting the rim without giving up the entire store on defense. They still play a methodical and effective brand of half-court basketball on offense; they're still great at preventing transition opportunities, despite sending multiple bodies to the offensive glass.
Even without Brown, the fundamentals of who the Celtics are haven't changed; the specifics of how they get there, though, are a little bit different. It starts with Tatum, now 18 months removed from rupturing his Achilles tendon and once again firmly entrenched as Boston's No. 1 option.
Tatum is still ironing out some of the wrinkles in his scoring game, finishing at substandard rates at the rim, from midrange and from beyond the 3-point arc. As he told reporters after blowing out the Charlotte Hornets last week, "I still got a little ways to to get back to being the best I ever felt."
Even with his bucket-getting lagging a bit, though, the 28-year-old is off to a flying start, averaging 27.1 points and 6.0 rebounds in 33.8 minutes per game. (He's been nails in crunch time, too, ranking eighth in the league in clutch scoring , with 21 points in 15 minutes on 8-for-13 shooting with three assists and zero turnovers.) Just as Brown stepped into a higher-volume role in his absence last season, Tatum has slid into the monster void left by Brown's departure this season. He's finishing a career-high 33.3% of Boston's offensive possessions with a shot attempt, foul drawn or turnover, and leads the Celtics in usage, touches and time of possession .
As Gary Washburn of the Boston Globe put it , "Within the Celtics organization, there appears to be a sense of relief that the tension is gone" — that the team's hierarchy is clarified and established, with Tatum at the top of the pecking order, George comfortably slotting in behind him , and everybody else falling in line after that. Despite that, though, it hasn't felt like Tatum's got a stranglehold of Boston's offense — far from it, in fact.
Tatum's on-ball percentage — literally the share of his floor time that he has the ball in his hands — is down from where it was the past two seasons . His average time of possession of 5.1 minutes per game, 33rd in the NBA , between Donovan Mitchell and Ja Morant.
His willingness to get off the ball rather than pound it has helped produce a more egalitarian attack. Boston is averaging 27.2 assists per game, seventh-most in the NBA , up from 24.6 per game (27th) last season . Those dimes are leading to 70 points per game via assist, sixth-most in the league , up from 64 per game (22nd) last season .
Plenty of those helpers are coming directly off Tatum's fingertips. In the early going of the season, his playmaking has really leapt off the screen. Whether working in the pick-and-roll, operating out of the post, or surveying from the top of the floor at the nail, he's mapping the floor and delivering on-time and on-target feeds more often than ever. Tatum is averaging a career-high 7.8 assists against 2.8 turnovers per game, creating more baskets at the rim than all but five players in the NBA, according to PBP Stats , and setting up more 3-pointers than all but eight. He's one of just two players in the NBA in the top 10 in both scoring and assists. The other? The scorching-hot Luka Dončić .
The player Tatum has assisted the most thus far this season? George, who's been the recipient of 13 Tatum dimes , and who has looked like a hand-in-glove fit in his new digs.
George has picked up where he left off last season, when he came back from a 25-game suspension for violating the NBA/NBPA joint anti-drug program by taking "improper medication" for mental health issues to shine for the Sixers in their playoff push and their first-round victory over these same Celtics. He's averaging 20.4 points, 5.2 rebounds and 4.1 assists in 30.1 minutes per game, shooting 50.7% on 2-pointers, 42.5% on 3-pointers while taking more than eight per game, and 80.8% from the free-throw line.
The nine-time All-Star isn't quite the full-tilt offensive force that he was earlier in his career, but he's fit in brilliantly as a secondary scorer and creator who can demand attention as an off-ball threat on offense, and a high-level, gap-filling playmaker who can help crank up the heat on the defensive end. He's still capable of assuming a larger role when called upon, too: When Tatum got the night off against the Bucks last Wednesday, George stepped to the forefront, scoring 25 points with 5 assists, 4 steals and 3 rebounds to lead the way in a 109-102 win .
"The way we're asking him to play is maybe a little bit different than what he's been asked to do in the past," Mazzulla told reporters in Milwaukee on Sunday. "He enjoys that, he's open-minded to it and he just works at it. He's very hard on himself. Holds himself to a very high standard, constantly watching film, taking notes in his journal and just processing the game. He takes pride in learning and getting better, and you're seeing the fruits of that."
The C's are also seeing the fruits of swapping Brown for George in the possession game. According to Jared Dubin's tracking at Last Night in Basketball , the Celtics finished 15th in the nightly possession battle last season, barely generating more scoring chances than their opposition on a night-to-night basis despite top-five finishes in both offensive rebounding rate and offensive turnover rate — due in large part to bottom-10 marks in both getting to the free-throw line and forcing turnovers on defense. Seven of the 14 teams that finished ahead of Boston last season won a playoff series — including all four conference finalists, and the Sixers team that eliminated them in the first round of the playoffs.
It is perhaps notable, then, that the rate at which the Celtics forced turnovers last season increased more with Brown off the floor than it did for any other player who logged at least 1,000 minutes — and that their forced turnover rate had been significantly higher with him off the floor in each of the previous two seasons.
So: Out went Brown, and in came George, a superior off-ball defender who has consistently posted higher steal rates, and center Mitchell Robinson, who'd built his reputation in New York as one of the league's premier extra-possession creators on offense and a disruptive presence in the middle on defense.
Robinson hasn't yet begun to make a major impact in tilting the math. After a sluggish start to the season following the Knicks' championship run and a short summer, the new arrival has started to round into shape, though, averaging 7.0 points, 8.0 rebounds and 2.7 steals-plus-blocks over the last three games , with the C's outscoring opponents by 30 points in his 53 minutes of floor time. All told, though, the Celtics have ratcheted up their board-crashing another notch, pulling in 34% of their missed shots through 10 games, up from 31.8% last season.
They're taking 6.5 more free-throw attempts per game, too, due in large part to a more concerted effort to pressure the rim. Last season, Boston ranked dead last in the share of its field goal attempts that came within four feet of the basket. This season, that's up to 17th .
Tatum's played a big role there. Replacing Brown's high-volume attacking as the only Celtic to rank in the top 50 in the league in drives to the basket per game, he's been living at the free-throw line. His previous career high in trips to the charity stripe was 8.4 per game, accumulated when averaging 36.9 minutes a night during the 2022-23 season. Through his first nine appearances of this season, he's taking 9.3 freebies in 33.8 minutes a night — a notable uptick on a per-minute and per-possession basis, and on pace for far and away the highest free-throw attempt rate of his career . (In fact, Tatum's .477 FTA rate ranks in the top 15 in the league among all non-centers .)
Most notably, though, the C's have been significantly more disruptive on the ball. Last season, Boston ranked 28th in the NBA in steals , 25th in deflections and 23rd in opponent turnover rate , playing more conservatively on defense in the belief that if they just stayed at home, funneled the ball to the areas and shooters they preferred, and contested, the math would work out in their favor over the long run.
This season, though — owing partly to the arrival of George, who's been a demon in the passing lanes in the early going — the Celtics are tied for 14th in steals , fifth in deflections and sixth in opponent turnover rate . They're cashing in on those miscues, too, scoring 20.8 points per game off turnovers — seventh-most in the league , and a full five points per game more than last season . (It's also on pace to be more than any Celtics team has posted since Rick Pitino was on the sidelines at the Garden, regaling reporters about Larry Bird and doors .)
Add up the gains in creating cough-ups, in getting to the line and in even more aggressively crashing the offensive boards, and the Celtics are now generating 4.1 more possessions per game than their opponents — the third-highest total in the league, according to Dubin's tracking .
Thanks to Tatum's playmaking, George's shotmaking and a collective effort from a deep rotation, the Celtics have made those extra possessions count, producing a top-five offense despite shooting just 63.2% at the rim as a team (a bottom-five mark ) and seeing multiple players (Tatum, Derrick White, Payton Pritchard, Baylor Scheierman, Jordan Walsh, Hugo González) struggle with frigid jumpers in the early going. If those perimeter players start to thaw out a little bit, this offense could hit a new level, and the Celtics could once again find themselves in the thick of the championship chase, even with Brown now plying his trade elsewhere in the division. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Source: Sports
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