Boston Celtics Make Admission About How Nikola Vucevic Trade Affected Team Chemistry

The NBA trade deadline can help a team find the help it needs, but it can come with some growing pains. The new guy can sometimes be a little too passive as he tries too hard to fit in, and his new teammates can be a little too aggressive in trying to get him involved, which takes them away from their normal flow.

It’s something the Celtics are dealing with after picking up Nikola Vucevic.

“We got to figure out the chemistry a little bit, the flow a little bit,” Jaylen Brown said after a rough loss to the New York Knicks. “We want Vuc to be a little bit more aggressive, looking for him to get going and make him feel confident in taking those shots and where he can catch the ball. I think he's still learning, but we need him to be aggressive. So we'll make adjustments, we'll communicate, we'll watch film, and we'll be better for it.”

Vucevic has been coming off the bench, something he hasn’t regularly done in 10 seasons. Since the 2017-18 season, he’s started all but five games before coming to Boston.

“[Joe Mazzulla] told me to be flexible, so I imagine maybe some games I start and some games I don’t,” Vucevic said when he was introduced on Friday. “But I’m fine either way with it. It’s not a big deal to me if I start or not or come off the bench. However I can help the team best, that’s what I’m willing to do.”

Shift in the starting lineup

The Celtics have responded with a double-big starting lineup with Luka Garza and Neemias Queta. They’ve run those two out together for the three games since Anfernee Simons was traded, and it’s been a mixed bag at best. It worked fine against a bigger, physical team like Houston, but it was a disaster against a smaller, fast team like Miami. The Knicks are a mix of both, but it still wasn’t great.

“We've tinkered with [the starting lineup] all year,” Mazzulla said after the loss. “I think we're up to 15 or 17 different ones, so nothing's changed. Everybody on our roster has a chance to impact winning. We have a chance to develop, do different things there, so whether before or after the trade deadline, nothing changes in our approach.”

The approach might be the same, but the results will be mixed until the lineups are sorted. Boston’s offensive rating for the season is 120, second in the NBA. But over the last three games, it’s at 109.

	OFFENSIVE RATING (NBA Rank)
Overall	120 (2)
January	119.9 (2)
February	113.3 (19)
Last Three Games	109.1 (25)

That's going to happen when they score 89 and 98 points in their last two outings.

“We’re playing a little different,” Derrick White said. “Obviously got some new guys in new spots, so I wouldn’t say we're as crisp as we were maybe a few weeks ago when we’d had the offseason and beginning of the year to kind of like figure those parts out. But I think it's exciting … I think we'll pick it up quickly.”

Integrating Vucevic

It’s not too difficult to see how Vucevic’s offensive skill set will help. He can hit threes, punish switches in the post, and find open teammates. The Celtics should be able to dip into the Al Horford playbook and find some things that worked in the past to integrate into the future.

The timing of the trade could actually help the Celtics, giving them an extra day off before facing the Bulls Wednesday night, and then a week during the All-Star break to dive into some film and come up with a plan.

“You’ve got to find that balance of watching the film coming in, working on different scenarios, and you’ve also got to let people kind of figure it out on their own,” White said. “So it's kind of tough on the fly, but we’re two, three games in. It’s not too [much] to really be worried about.”

The Celtics mood hasn’t changed since the trade. They have largely shrugged off their recent struggles to score as a combination of abnormally cold shooting and the normal growing pains of working a new guy into the mix. Simons was a scoring wing who could just be unleashed, while Vucevic is a big center who needs the ball fed to him to score. There isn’t a hint of frustration inside the locker room.

"I think that will come more with time to kind of see how I can fit best with this team,” Vucevic said. “I totally understand that my role will be different than what it was for most of my career in Chicago and Orlando before. I was fine with that. That might take some time to adjust to…. It's all part of the process, getting acclimated to a new system and a new role.

“I'm here to really help in any way I can to help this team to be the best we can and hopefully get a deep playoff run. So whatever that will require me to do, I'll try to do it."