The interesting thing about that Boston team is that their offense looked terrible against Philadelphia pretty much the whole game and they still won because their defense made a pretty solid Sixers team look even worse. If anything that team is an argument for how you can get away with a barely effective offense by being elite on the other end. Over the course of the season they ranked 1st in Defensive Rating and 18th in Offensive Rating. Oh and check this out, while they were only 10th in 3pt attempts per game they were 2nd only to the Warriors in percentage at 37.7% just ahead of (gasp) our lowly Kings who rounded out the top 3 at 37.5%. So while the rest of the league continues their 3pt shooting arms race Brad Stevens' Celtics suggest a different path forward: load up on talented swingmen who can smother other team's shooters and take just enough threes to keep yourself afloat by making the few you do take at an elite rate. We've already got one half of that equation down. Yeah our offense was ugly at times but so is Boston's. They're just better than us at everything else.
And on another related note, while Al Horford is certainly not a top 25 player offensively, when you factor in his versatility he's probably a top 25 individual defender which is arguably
more important (and he's been too good for too long on that end to call him a product of Brad Stevens, though I will credit Stevens for knowing how to use him effectively).
But wait! (I hear you asking) how is a top 25 defender more important than a top 25 scorer?! Top 25 scorers are the category of player that wins all the awards after all. As I've noted in other threads, teams need at least one top tier scorer but they also need at least one top tier defender. Doesn't that make them (at best) equally important? Well yeah, all things being equal it does but impact scorers always seem to outnumber impact defenders about 3 to 1. I can think of two dozen guys in the same general ballpark as say Jrue Holiday on offense. I can think of maybe 8 who favorably compare to a Tony Allen level defender. As it happens, we've got 3 players who could potentially fill that scoring role in Fox, Hield, and Bogdanovic. Unless Giles is all kinds of amazing when he gets out there, it doesn't appear that we have that top tier defender yet. We can win with the scoring guards we have now if we manage to upgrade the defense into the elite tier and that might be a more attainable goal than hoping and praying a generational scoring talent somehow falls into our laps.
And lastly... a player on Al Horford's level would be an absolute
steal at pick #7. Kyrie Irving, Jaylen Brown, Al Horford and Jayson Tatum were all top 3 picks. If we land a player as capable as any of them at #7 we're doing well. Forget about the "we need a superstar" idea, that went out the window with wins 22 through 27 I'm sorry to say. Unless we win the lottery and draft Luka.