Sam Hauser is on fire, and he helped the Boston Celtics torch the Indiana Pacers

BOSTON -- The life of a 3-point shooter is filled with highs and lows. The nature of the shot -- the distance, the defense, the momentum of the body -- lends itself to a bit of streakiness. When the shot isn’t falling, like during Sam Hauser’s November when he hit just 19 of them during a 27.5% shooting slump, it can be easy to lose confidence.

“It happens to everybody throughout every season,” Hauser said after helping the Celtics beat the Pacers Wednesday night at TD Garden. “You're going to hit it a low, you're going to be on a high. It's just a matter of taking every day for what it is. Sometimes you want it to happen right away, and it just doesn't, and you just got to keep working through it. That’s kind of what it was this season, and now we're here.”

Here is January, where Hauser has hit 41 triples in four fewer games than that frigid November stretch. Hauser is shooting 48.2% this month, but if we toss out the six he forced trying to catch Marcus Smart’s record, we can easily say he’s shooting 52% on real, flow-of-the-game 3-pointers.

Hauser is so hot right now, he can clear snowy driveways just by standing in the middle of them for a few minutes.

“It opens everything up for us,” Neemias Queta said. “When you got a guy like that, you got to hug up on the perimeter. You don't want to lose him and give him a 3-poiners, otherwise, it’s money.”

Queta and Hauser have a bit of a symbiotic relationship. Hauser creates space for Queta to roll and catch lobs, which forces the defense to account for Queta on future pick-and-roll plays, which in turn creates space for Hauser to catch-and-shoot.

“It starts with Neemi setting a great screen,” Hauser said. “We have such dynamic ball handlers that they're able to kind of create an advantage even when the screen’s not even there, which makes it easier for me on the back end of the play to get open and get to space. But you just kind of have to adjust to it and try to take what the defense has given you at that moment in time.”

Hauser continues to find great looks in the opponent’s defensive schemes, but as Joe Mazzulla always insists on pointing out, Hauser is not defined by 3-point shooting.

“Sam's ability to just continue to play two-way basketball, his ability to defend at a high level … and then it's him being able to create 2-on-1s,” Mazzulla said. “He's obviously a threat because of his ability to shoot the ball, to create, 2-on-1s, whether it's with off-ball, whether it's with pick-and-roll. So I think it's a credit to our guys, finding him within our system to create those, and he makes shots for himself.”

Some of those plays actually come when he steps inside the 3-point line, which doesn’t happen very often. He has taken 273 3-pointers and 36 2-pointers, but sometimes the closer shots can come with a little sauce on them, like when he left Pascal Siakam in the dust late in the game.

Holy crap Sam Hauser pic.twitter.com/3CQus9VWT0
— Danielle Hobeika (@DanielleHobeika) January 22, 2026

Or sometimes he doesn’t have to shoot at all, like when he found Queta for an easy dunk.

Really beautiful drive and dish by Sam Hauser to set up the Neemias Queta dunk pic.twitter.com/tNcv9PDvpl
— Danielle Hobeika (@DanielleHobeika) January 22, 2026

“I know I'm capable of doing other things other than shooting the 3,” Hauser said. “It's just kind of what I'm asked to do the most, and that's kind of how I started to get on the floor in Boston. I tried to run with that and become as great of a shooter as I can each and every day, and then also building off that. Which, the next phase to a shot is a shot fake and drive. So I know capable of it, and when it presents itself, I try to take advantage.”

Hauser started slow, but now he seems to have settled into a very effective starting role for the Celtics. And while he’s capable of more, the 3-point shooting is his number one priority and the rest will flow off of that. There will certainly be stretches where the shot goes away for a little while, but Hauser knows it will always end up coming back.

“You just try to shoot every shot like you're going to make it and just try to be process-oriented and not result-based,” he said. “If you're taking the right shots and you're shooting with confidence, regardless of if it goes in or not, you should be happy with that. And that's what I try to do throughout the game. Sometimes I'm not great at it and it gets to me if I'm missing, but tonight they were going in.”