The Celtics have, as you’ve surely heard, far exceeded expectations without injured superstar Jayson Tatum this season.
They’ve also navigated sporadic absences by Tatum’s longtime co-star without breaking stride.
Jaylen Brown missed his seventh game of the season Monday in Milwaukee, sitting out with what the team called an illness on the second night of a back-to-back, and Boston won easily, pummeling the Bucks 108-81.
It was the Celtics’ sixth victory without Brown, all of them decided by at least 16 points. Their lone loss was a 98-96 defeat at Indiana on Dec. 12, after which the NBA admitted Pascal Siakam’s late game-winner should have been negated by an illegal screen.
Monday’s game was the third time this season the Celtics won on the road, with Brown inactive, after playing in a different city the previous night, including blowout victories over Kevin Durant’s Houston Rockets and Giannis Antetokounmpo’s Bucks. They have yet to allow more than 101 points in a game that Brown missed, holding those seven opponents to an average of 91.8 points.
Oh, and they also faced Milwaukee without starting center Neemias Queta (rest), who got the night off after piling up 27 points, 17 rebounds and three blocks in Sunday’s home win over Philadelphia.
The Celtics have sat multiple starters in three games and won all three, previously prevailing at Cleveland on Nov. 30 without Queta and Derrick White, and at Houston on Feb. 4 without Brown and Sam Hauser.
Monday’s starting lineup — which featured rookie Hugo Gonzalez starting for Brown and trade-deadline pickup Nikola Vucevic in for Queta — was the 13th different one Boston has won with this season.
“One of the strengths of the locker room has always been being able to win games when guys have been out,” head coach Joe Mazzulla told reporters after Monday’s victory. “We’ve sat guys over the last three, four years and still have been able to win games. That’s just kind of the DNA of the locker room, and you’re continuing to see that.”
That’s true. Last season, the Celtics went 15-4 in games Brown missed and 8-2 when Tatum sat. In their 2023-24 championship campaign, they were a perfect 12-0 without Brown and 7-1 without Tatum. In Mazzulla’s first year, 2022-23, Boston went 11-4 without Brown and 5-3 without Tatum, with three of those seven losses coming in overtime.
But those prior Celtics teams had much more proven talent, with six established starters and some of the NBA’s top role players. Depth was supposed to be an issue for this season’s squad, considering roughly half of its current rotation wasn’t seeing regular playing time a year ago.
Instead, Boston has remained one of the deepest and most resilient teams in the league, thanks in part to massive leaps by players like Queta, Baylor Scheierman and Jordan Walsh, and an impressive debut season from Gonzalez. The 20-year-old wing turned in the best outing of his young career Monday night, notching 18 points, 16 rebounds, three steals and two blocks while also drawing the primary defensive assignment against Antetokounmpo.
Gonzalez spent a team-high 4:02 defending the two-time NBA MVP, per NBA player tracking, and those possessions resulted in more Antetokounmpo turnovers (two) than made field goals (1-for-4).
“I think we’ve just got our standard, and we want to maintain it every single game,” Gonzalez, who leads the league in individual net rating, told NBC Sports Boston sideline reporter Abby Chin. “We don’t like to (make) excuses. Obviously, we’ve got some really, really important players — starting, important players — that were (out with) illness or resting, and I think we’ve got a really good spirit and we took a difficult win after two games in 20 hours.”
At 41-20, the Celtics own the second-best record in the Eastern Conference and third-best in the NBA, trailing only the Oklahoma City Thunder, Detroit Pistons and San Antonio Spurs. They’ll return home Wednesday to face the surging Charlotte Hornets, who have won 13 of their last 17 and own the second-best net rating during that stretch.
