The Celtics won their third straight game Monday night and improved to 10-8 on the season. Riding both the hot hand of Jayson Tatum and elite defense, the Celtics have turned their season around and have won eight of their last 11 games.
Jayson Tatum scored 30 points for the fourth straight game of the season and is now beginning to look like the player fans expected to see this season.
Tonight also marked the return of Jaylen Brown where he scored a respectable 19 points in just 23 minutes.
The two keys to the Celtics’ win over the Rockets was the rebounding and bench scoring, two things they had been lacking in key moments this season.
The C’s dominated the glass and won the rebounding battle by 17.
The Rockets bench did still manage to outscore the Celtics bench, but they did enough to help secure the win.
The Celtics defense has taken a tremendous leap after their horrendous 2-5 start, and have held teams below 100 points in seven of their last 11 games. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to fans because everyone could see that the Celtics had the personnel to be elite on the defensive end but just hadn’t been able to figure out how to make it work. Now it is finally starting to come together and the Celtics are gonna make teams work for everything on that end of the floor.
If the Celtics can pair this with a consistent offensive game, there aren’t many teams in the league that can compete with them.
The Celtics will get a real test to see how far their defense has come on Wednesday night versus the Brooklyn Nets.
(Photo of Grant Williams Brian Babineau/NBAE via Getty Images)