It’s no secret that Boston Celtics big man Daniel Theis’ defensive excellence in the 2019-20 NBA season put the German center in the team’s starting role at center in a season most assumed it would be a position filled by committee and matchup.
But he didn’t just earn a starting role according to some analysts — he actually stepped into some very big shoes defensively and filled them well enough to hand the Celtics a top-five defense for most of the season.
Those big shoes would belong to Al Horford, who left the team over the summer in free agency to join the Philadelphia 76ers, causing many experts to assume the team’s defensive coherence would take a big step back.
It did not, surprisingly, thanks to Theis — and the Athletic’s Jared Weiss recently explained why on the popular NBA basketball podcast “Dunc’d On”.
I went on the Dunc’d On Pod with @NateDuncanNBA to discuss the Celtics season that was and maybe still will be.
We went deep on Tatum’s transformation, how the defense became elite after losing Horford, and even Romeo Langford’s defensive acumen. https://t.co/30AzlTATJg
— Jared Weiss (@JaredWeissNBA) April 30, 2020
“Daniel Theis is replicating so much of what Al Horford did defensively that it’s kind of remarkable,” he began.
“They’ve limited it so that his his main function in the defense is as a drop defender and pick and roll, and he’s doing it just about as well as Horford did — and Horford was maybe the best in the league at that. And Theis has been pretty close to that. He’s just he he reads the screens really well, he positions himself just right, [and] he’s able to take in pretty much anybody driving on him and go vertical without fouling and contests at the rim.”
“He doesn’t really block them, and … he’s one of the best in the league at contesting with verticality at the rim and getting a stop,” added Weiss.
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For the Athletic analyst, it’s not some overwhelming leap forward that has made the Saltzigger native so valuable this season, but rather a culmination of many small steps Theis has made to improve his game and make his teammates better in the process.
“He’s the perfect defender for the system, and he doesn’t do anything really exceptional, but he executes his job pretty much to perfection, and he puts an effort throughout the possession and he lets all their really talented perimeter defenders do their job.”
In many ways, Theis is hearkening back to the style of skilled big man that was long the hallmark of Celtics teams in their glory years of the 1960s and 1970s recently expounded on by Boston legend Dave Cowens.
But it also has a more modern twist in how Theis uses the gravity of his teammates to get open shots at the perimeter, or adapts big man Marcin Gortat’s offensive screening strategies to open lanes for his teammates.
All in all, the German big man is among the most criminally underrated players in the NBA in 2019-20 — but don’t expect that trend to continue long into the future if the veteran center keeps providing this level of pay.
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