Anfernee Simons catches fire, leads Celtics to trap game win over Bulls: 7 takeaways

Boston Celtics

The Celtics are now second in the Eastern Conference following their 115-101 win over the Bulls.

Anfernee Simons got hot in the second half, and a scruffy-looking Celtics team beat the Bulls 115-101 in their return from a five-game road trip.

Here are the takeaways. 

Anfernee Simons ignited (and the Celtics needed it). 

Simons is now well-established as a player who can get hot and change the complexion of a game in the blink of an eye, but he also has the ability to affect a game more quietly. You had to look closely, but tucked into the background of Jaylen Brown’s 50-point decimation of the Clippers on Saturday were several buckets by Simons that won’t be remembered long but helped the Celtics hold the Clippers at arm’s length. Simons is—at his best—as good a scorer as you’ll find in the NBA, but sometimes the Celtics just need him to fill the gaps.

In the first half of Monday’s game against the Bulls, Simons was silent—0-for-3 and no points, seemingly content to be a body on the floor as Payton Pritchard, a heck of a lot of offensive rebounds, and a hard-nosed defensive performance built a 20-point lead. 

The Bulls, as NBA teams do when they go down by 20 in the first half, made a bit of a push in the third quarter, but Simons pushed back—after he made a 3-pointer and a tough runner falling out of bounds along the baseline, it looked like he might be piecing together another quiet-but-notable performance like Saturday. 

Then Simons went off with the force of a firecracker. His first 3-pointer found the net halfway through the third quarter. Roughly 17 minutes of gametime later, he buried his eighth 3-pointers of the game, all of which were necessary as the Celtics beat back a surprisingly robust push by the Bulls that trimmed the lead from 23 to 11 with plenty of time remaining to finish the comeback. Simons finished with a season-high 27 points, all of which came in the second half, and he shot 8-for-14 from 3-point range.

Joe Mazzulla offered Simons profuse praise for his work ethic, noting that while other players come in on off days to get shots up, Simons gets his shots in and doubles up with work on his defense. 

“He came in with just an open mind of, ‘what do I have to do to get on the floor? What do I need to do to play? What do you need from me?’” Mazzulla said. “And then it was, ‘how can I help you?’ 

“So there really wasn’t a challenge. He came in with a very open mind, and he came in wanting to compete, and those two things, you can take care of it.”

That level of buy-in, of course, was never a guarantee. Simons was one of the top scorers in Portland, a borderline All-Star and a constant starter. The Celtics’ roster boasted an embarrassment of riches last season, and while Brad Stevens was forced to pair down those riches over the summer, acquiring a 20-point-per-game scorer to take on a super-sub bench role has proven to be a good piece of work.

Simons said the challenge of joining a winning situation has been “fun.”

“I feel like I’ve grown so much in a lot of areas, just mentally, and how to approach each and every game,” he said. “Just the attention to detail and the intensity that we know we play each and every night. That’s the standard that’s been set, and so I’ve been pretty pleased with myself. And then obviously the team, how much we’ve been taking on that challenge, it’s been showing.”

The Celtics are now second in the East.

Simons isn’t wrong: The Celtics’ work is showing. After the Pistons handed the Knicks a 30-point beatdown (on the second night of a back-to-back, no less, if you had any remaining questions about the legitimacy of the Pistons), the Celtics’ win lifted them to 23-12—a half game above the Knicks for second, and 3.5 games behind the Pistons. 

The Celtics, of course, were not ready to rest on their laurels afterward. 

“I take a lot of pride in being first in the East, and we still need some work to get to that point,” Pritchard said. “So that’s the main goal.”

That attitude certainly seems to be part of the reason the Celtics are at this point—they have learned how to win, they expect to win, and they execute like a winning team, even on nights when they have no business winning. 

“I was pleased with how they played,” Mazzulla said with a chuckle. “They didn’t look very good out there, but they played hard. I was not pleased with how they looked, but I was pleased with how they tried and how they played and how they competed, but they looked relatively tired.”

Jaylen Brown and Derrick White looked exhausted.

Nobody looked more tired than Brown, whose huge performance on the road trip finally seemed to catch up with him a bit. Brown started the game 1-for-9, missing a number of shots he normally makes at a nearly automatic clip, and he finished with 14 points on 6-for-24 shooting. 

The timing is, of course, a little tough for everyone who loosed their “Jaylen Brown deserves some MVP chatter!” takes onto the internet Sunday and Monday, but given that the Celtics were still in Los Angeles yesterday, we can probably cut him some slack, especially since he was a team-high +12 with eight rebounds and four assists.

White can get some slack as well, since he offered his usual otherworldly levels of defense while shooting 3-for-15. He also made a 3-pointer in the fourth quarter, preserving his lengthy streak of games with a made triple.

Payton Pritchard made a heave.

Pritchard is rightfully known as an end-of-quarter maestro—when you make a halfcourt shot as part of a Finals-clinching win, you earn lifetime status. 

Still, Pritchard has come close a number of times, but he hadn’t made an end-of-quarter heave in a while prior to Monday, when he somehow dropped in a 3-pointer over three defenders as time expired in the first half. 

“I think that might have been like my first buzzer beater that was a legit shot, not at the rim, this year,” Pritchard said. “So it felt good to hit one.”