The MVP candidate and the second unit caught fire in the City of Brotherly Love.
With 3:14 left in the first quarter, Jayson Tatum returned to the Wells Fargo Center floor after taking his customary first quarter rest on the bench. Moments later, Luke Kornet would join him, completing Boston’s second-unit-plus-Tatum lineup that has devastated opponents all season.
Tatum and the bench — Payton Pritchard, Sam Hauser, Al Horford, and Luke Kornet — are surprisingly the third most used lineup of the year with 98 minutes played together. Unsurprisingly, they’re one of the most effective fivesomes that head coach Joe Mazzulla can deploy.
They’re stingier than Jaylen Brown, Jayson Tatum, Derrick White, and Jrue Holiday plus Horford (99.5 vs. 101.1 points per 100 possessions) and nearly as efficient offensively as Kristaps Porzingis with the starters (111.0 vs. 111.9).
On offense, there’s a natural synergy between the fivesome with Tatum as he trigger, Pritchard, Hauser, and Horford spacing the floor, and Kornet working as a lighthouse in the short roll. They ran this set
What will stick out from the blowout in Philly is Pritchard’s shooting (he led the team in scoring with 28 points and hit 8-of-15 from behind the arc), but more importantly, watch how the clockwork precision grinds the 76ers defense under its gears.
After a Tatum-Kornet pick-and-pop to open up the halfcourt set, Philly’s defense is already compromised. The lumbering Andre Drummond plays up to defend Tatum’s pull-up three and he’ll find out in a second that he’ll have to do the same with Pritchard swinging around double screens by first Hauser then Kornet.
It’s all about leveraging each players’ strengths and forcing the defense to make multiple decisions at the same time. It’s everything, everywhere, all at once.
The Celtics ran almost the exact same action off a sideline out of bounds play. Even in a dead ball scenario, the five-out spacing forces Philly to communicate and cover the entire floor, but if the screens are good and you’re targeting the slowest defender on the floor, you’ll find a great shot for a hot shooter.
After Pritchard had already buried four threes, the Sixers are now hyper aware of his shooting, so much so that Quentin Grimes tries to shoot the gap of the Hauser-Kornet picket fence and hits Luke in the face.
On the ensuing SLOB, the Celtics just simply flip the play to the left side. Grimes toplocks Pritchard’s path to the ball so Fast PP makes the next read and cuts to the basket. It’s now Hauser getting freed up for a three with Kornet’s cut drawing Kelly Oubre into the paint. With gravity sucking in to the restricted area, Pritchard pops out for another triple.
In less than four minutes of playing time running variations of the same set, Boston scored 14 points with four starters on the bench and Tatum tallying three assists with the bench.