Joe Mazzulla cant say why, but Sam Hausers defense has been a big surprise

May 2024 · 6 minute read

BOSTON — When Sam Hauser replaced Grant Williams in the rotation last season, the Boston Celtics coaching staff had a simple rationale.

Teams loved targeting Hauser on defense, and yet he had the league’s best defensive rating. Individual plus-minus is a noisy stat that can be inflated by external factors quite easily, but there was something to this.

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Opponents kept shutting down their offense to put Hauser on an island and found it to be rather inhospitable. They weren’t writing HELP in the sand, but they weren’t loving the island life either. Slowly but surely, their offensive efficiency would decline, the Celtics would keep scoring, and the lead would steadily open.

This was ultimately an effort to get Hauser the experience he needed to be playoff-ready when defensive intensity and offensive execution skyrocket and most fringe rotation players hardly sniff the floor. And while he wasn’t quite ready for the big time come spring, the dividends of that process are starting to show.

Sam Hauser can defend. He’s shooting lights out this season, so you might have missed it. Though it may not be apparent at first glance, he is a two-way player.

“I think he’s a much better defender than people think,” Mazzulla said of the white-hot Hauser. “I can’t say why because I’d get in trouble.”

Well, let’s try to get into this a little bit.

“His technique and his ability to know tendencies, I feel just as comfortable with him guarding as anybody else,” Mazzulla said. “I’ve said it from day one: I think he’s a very, very good defender, underrated, and as he continues to get better, it makes our team better.”

So how is it going for those scorers trying to go at him?

Hauser is a great matchup for someone like Jalen Brunson because his best trait is staying on balance. You can see how he’s gleaned plenty from Derrick White over the past year, one of the league’s best at keeping his body glued to a ballhandler without fouling.

When Hauser gets iso’d, he tends to let the ballhandler get into his body and keeps his hands up to try to take away driving lanes. Then he gets a hand in their face when they inevitably take the pull-up jumper. If someone drives by him in the pick-and-roll, he’s been good at staying attached to their hip to force them into a floater and then often can get his hand on the shot.

Even against higher-level athletes like Immanuel Quickley, he’s been able to get a hand on the layup off the release and send the ballhandler toward the rim protector.

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This isn’t a novel phenomenon with Hauser, but his consistency and comfort level are clearly higher. The real improvement comes in his off-ball work, as he has become an active defender with a good nose for passing lanes.

There was one play late in the first quarter that showed the full evolution of his help defense, where he showed how he’s making quicker reads and playing more on his toes.

The possession starts with Hauser guarding Donte DiVincenzo in the weak corner while the New York Knicks are running a wide pick-and-roll against the opposing sideline. When that action happens, Hauser is inevitably going to have to help and recover to stop whatever comes next.

Because Kristaps Porziņģis has been guarding pick-and-rolls in drop coverage in most matchups, the Celtics typically have the nearest perimeter defender sink to the free-throw line to clog up the lane. But that leaves a shooter open one pass away, so that help defender — in this case, Al Horford — is vulnerable when he goes to recover.

That’s where Hauser comes in.

What Hauser pulls off here is simple but savvy. He knows there’s a good chance Josh Hart can blow by Horford, but Hauser doesn’t want to just go help and leave his own man wide open for 3 in the corner.

So he waits for Hart to catch the ball and make a read, jump toward his own man to make Hart put the ball on the floor, then immediately pivots back toward the lane to pick up Hart’s drive. Horford then switches down to the corner and everyone is matched up again.

Hauser actually was so effective with this little help-side dance that Porziņģis and White didn’t need to help off their own guys that much, so White could have sat in the passing lane to pick off that kick out to Quickley. As Hauser keeps proving his meddle on defense, his teammates may stay home on their assignments even more and trust he can get the stop.

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But Hauser wasn’t done here. After Quickley missed the 3, he boxed out Hart on the perimeter. Even though it wasn’t relevant to how the rest of the sequence played out, it’s important for everyone to be boxing out or running out in transition. Then when the rebound fell into Mitchell Robinson’s hands, Hauser managed to guard multiple passing lanes at once and get a deflection to take away a layup.

The save at the end was the icing on the cake, but it was the way he snuck into the paint with both hands up that showed his growth. He knew Hart was behind him, ready to catch and shoot, so he didn’t want to just sprint toward Quickley. So he patiently slid into the play, waiting to pounce on whatever decision Robinson ultimately made.

It’s just apparent that with a more clearly defined role, Hauser is playing with confidence. For a player who is more laid back in nature, that’s giving him the edge he needs.

“You can kind of dig your feet in a little bit, you could say,” Hauser said. “And just knowing that your number’s going to get called more often this year than it was last year is pretty cool and you just want to make the most of it and kind of have gratitude with where you’re at.”

Hauser is shooting 47.5 percent from deep, seventh in the NBA among players with at least 40 attempts. He just went 4-for-6 in consecutive games. Mazzulla is even taking the second unit plays designed to get Jayson Tatum the ball and using his star as a decoy to get Hauser a wide-open look.

The Knicks defense didn’t see that one coming. Hauser is still catching teams by surprise, so the question is whether he can sustain this hot start.

But Hauser could show all this growth on offense and still would struggle to see the floor in the playoffs if he couldn’t defend. At some point, he was going to have to graduate from being the guy who could handle being targeted to an active part of the defensive scheme. With the way things are looking now, he can keep those feet dug in.

(Photo: Maddie Meyer / Getty Images)

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