Celtics' season-best shooting paves way for rout of short-handed Grizzlies
Published in Basketball
BOSTON — So this is how the Celtics look when their three championship-winning headliners all are clicking.
Jaylen Brown, Derrick White and Payton Pritchard scored 19 or more points in the same game for the first time this season Wednesday night at TD Garden. The result: a 131-95 dismantling of the visiting Grizzlies that improved Boston’s record to 6-7.
The Celtics got 19 points on 8-of-16 shooting from Brown, 20 on 6-of-11 shooting from White and 24 on 8-of-15 shooting from Pritchard, who put together their most complete performance of the season against a nosediving Memphis team that was playing without mercurial star point guard Ja Morant and starting center Zach Edey.
The trio of returning regulars combined to shoot 10 for 21 from 3-point range, lifting a revamped offense that’s struggled to replicate the shooting efficiency of previous Celtics teams.
Brown is well above his typical pace in most scoring and shooting metrics through 13 games, but White and Pritchard have been far less consistent as shooters — especially from 3-point range, where they entered Wednesday with a combined success rate of 26.9%. As a team, Boston came in shooting 44.4% overall (24th in the NBA) and 32.8% from deep (27th).
The Celtics made 50.5% of their field goals and a season-best 41.2% of their 3s against the Grizzlies. This season, coach Joe Mazzulla’s squad is 4-0 when it shoots better than 36% from beyond the arc and 2-7 when it doesn’t.
The Celtics controlled play throughout the first quarter, building an early 12-point lead while shooting better than 50% from the field and 46% from 3. White spearheaded that hot start with 10 first-quarter points on five shots — encouraging efficiency from a player who’d shot above 40% in just two games this season.
Memphis rallied late in the first and trailed by five midway through the second, but Boston dominated the final five minutes before halftime, sprinting into the break with a 23-7 run. Brown scored 12 of those points, and Pritchard capped the onslaught with a high-speed coast-to-coast layup that made it 67-46 with 1.2 seconds left in the half.
Another first-half standout: backup big man Luka Garza, who went 2 for 3 from 3-point range and grabbed three offensive rebounds. He finished with 14 points on 6-of-8 shooting and seven boards in his fourth double-digit scoring effort of the season.
Memphis never threatened after halftime. The Celtics built a 31-point third-quarter lead and waltzed to a 36-point victory. The 131 points were Boston’s second-highest total of the season.
Pritchard was the last Boston starter to be shut down for the night, subbing out for two-way player Ron Harper Jr. with 4:16 remaining.
Other observations:
— Jordan Walsh, moved into the starting lineup for the first time this season after impressing off the bench in the previous four games, played competitive defense against the much larger Jaren Jackson Jr., forcing the Grizzlies big man into two offensive fouls in the second quarter. Walsh did encounter some of his own fouling issues, however, limiting him to 12 minutes.
— Josh Minott, whom Walsh replaced in the top unit, played 22 minutes off the bench and finished with nine points, five rebounds and one block.
— White played most of the game with a swollen upper lip after taking a shot to the face during the first quarter. Those types of injuries have been commonplace for the veteran guard, who famously shattered his front teeth on the Garden parquet during Game 5 of the 2024 NBA Finals.
— Pritchard’s six rebounds pushed him over 1,000 for his career.
— Mazzulla went deeper into his bench than he has in most games this season, giving first-half minutes to 12 different players. Hugo Gonzalez saw the least action of those 12, playing eight mostly garbage-time minutes after spraining his ankle one night earlier in Philadelphia. Ex-Grizzlies big man Xavier Tillman was the only Celtics player who did not see action.
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