BOSTON — Joe Mazzulla didn’t need to tell Al Horford how much the Boston Celtics would demand from him Sunday. With Kristaps Porziņģis sidelined by an illness in a matchup against the Denver Nuggets and three-time MVP Nikola Jokić, Horford must have recognized the extent of his responsibilities on his own. Plus, Mazzulla suggested, Horford doesn’t need any pep talks when Boston needs him most.
“Nah,” Mazzulla said with a big grin. “You don’t have to talk to him.”
The Celtics don’t need to wind up Horford. He already has a battery in his back when he sees one of the NBA’s premier big men on the other side of the court. It was Jokić on Sunday, when Horford’s 19 points and eight rebounds keyed a 110-103 Boston win, but it could have been Giannis Antetokounmpo or Joel Embiid. Even at age 38, Horford craves the biggest games against the best opponents.
“I really just relish these moments,” Horford said, “and these type of games.”
The bigger the game, the tougher the opponent, the more likely Horford is to blast his music. Sunday, he did it on both ends of the court, falling one shy of his season high in points while tussling with Jokić for the majority of Boston’s defensive possessions. Horford, easily the Celtics’ best matchup for Jokić, never ran out of gas despite reaching the 35-minute mark for just the third time this season. While scoring 13 points in the first half, Horford showed a rare willingness to look for his offense inside. He finished with three steals and three fast-break layups while helping the Celtics hold Jokić to 20 points, 14 rebounds and nine assists.
“I just like to compete,” Horford said. “It comes down to that. In Jokić’s case, in my opinion, he’s probably the top player in our league right now. It’s just so much that he does. He’s so difficult to defend because he’s so unpredictable. What makes it worse is that he plays the right way. He’s looking to make winning plays, and somehow he still gets all these crazy numbers and these crazy stats.
“For me, when you go against a guy like that, it’s not me against him. It’s everybody really has to be synced in (to) what we need to do and what the game plan was. I felt like our guys were tonight, and they provided that help.”
Horford’s numbers have dipped. His touches have dropped. After all these years, he remains indispensable for the Celtics, especially against the league’s best big men.
“It’s huge,” Derrick White said. “Especially guys of the highest caliber of Jokić. You’ve seen him guard pretty much every big in the league, so it’s a lot of trust we have in him. He’s always going to make it difficult for them, as difficult as you can. He’s just a great guy to have on your team.”
How difficult is Jokić to cover? Mazzulla said the Celtics didn’t even focus on him in the game plan. They spent more time worrying about the details they could disrupt.
“It’s not about him,” Mazzulla said. “It’s about controlling all the other stuff that you can control. They’re one of the best teams in the league on cuts. Can you take all their cuts? Can you take away their transition leak-outs by not turning it over, by crashing the offensive glass? Can you try to keep him off the free-throw line? Can you win the minutes that he’s not on the court?”
Even with that mentality, the Celtics weren’t just going to shrug their shoulders and let Jokić do whatever he pleased.
“You don’t really talk about it, but you know everything runs through him,” Horford said. “He’s such a smart player that it’s difficult. So what you want to do is, to Joe’s point, try to limit other guys the best way that you can and take away certain tendencies and things like that.”
The Celtics prioritized rim protection by starting Luke Kornet alongside Horford. Kornet, assigned to Russell Westbrook, essentially begged the nine-time All-Star to shoot from the outside. That strategy left Kornet near the basket, where Jokić does so much damage as a scorer and passer. That extra layer of help defense gave Horford a security blanket. Still, even against the top players, he doesn’t need much of one.
“You take a look at his stat sheet, it doesn’t always show what he does for us,” Mazzulla said. “Most of what he does can’t be measured. But he has the innate ability to impact the game in so many different ways, and he’s one of the best players in the league at guarding the other best players in the league, no matter the position that they have. He was just elite tonight on the defensive end of the floor with his positioning, his communication, his physicality, his rebounding. So it was amazing to watch.”
The Celtics trust Horford to handle some of the league’s most difficult matchups without double-teams. His versatility tends to show the most in pivotal moments. He guarded Jokić for most of the afternoon but switched on to Jamal Murray multiple times late in the fourth quarter. The Celtics changed their defensive coverages after Murray drilled a 3-pointer over Horford with three minutes left. He was laying back on the play.
A couple of minutes later, Murray took advantage of Boston’s new strategy. When Horford pressed up on Murray to force a drive with a little more than a minute left, the Denver guard drove past the big man to cut Boston’s advantage to 102-99.
On the following Nuggets possession, they again tried to target Horford on the switch. He was ready for the challenge.
Horford’s deflection started a fast break. He hustled to finish the sequence with a game-sealing layup that had only one problem, according to Jaylen Brown.
“He’s supposed to dunk that,” Brown said, “but he’s got five kids so we let him slide.”
It’s easy to joke about Horford’s age, but he has stayed in good enough shape to keep up with a young man’s game. Not many centers can stand up to the league’s bulkiest players on the low block and then switch out onto the highest-scoring guards, but he does it all for the Celtics defense. Beyond the matchup against Jokić, Horford had some extra incentive Sunday. After consecutive losses to the Detroit Pistons and Cleveland Cavaliers, he said he wanted to avoid his team’s first three-game losing skid of the season. The Celtics, without two starters in Porziņģis and Jrue Holiday (finger), knew Denver would challenge them too.
“It’s always fun to play these types of games,” Horford said. “More than anything for us, we lost two and (were) on the verge of losing three in a row. I feel like our group, we knew we had to respond. Short-handed again and just kind of find a way. It felt like our energy from our group was great tonight.”
So much of that energy stemmed from Horford.
“He helps us — our versatility can go beyond measure,” Mazzulla said. “One of the best things he does is his positioning and his pick-and-roll communication, and so it just gives us a ton of versatility. We can play small with him at the five. We could play big. He could play alongside someone else. But just as much as he helps us versus the opponent, he helps us in our own locker room because of his competitiveness. I think some people mistake his kindness for a weakness at times, but he’s one of the most competitive people I know. You can tell when he brings it, and tonight was one of those nights.”
When the Celtics see Horford ramping up his intensity, they follow his lead.
“When it’s there,” Brown said, “you know.”
“I think every game he brings it,” White added, “but (he) just kind of had that edge today. I feel like when he’s saving the ball or creating extra possessions for us, that’s kind of like when you notice it. But we definitely had that mindset, and we did a better job than we have in the past of finding him, and he made big plays for us on both sides of the ball.”
(Photo: Winslow Townson / Getty Images)
