The Boston Celtics Don’t Need Derrick White’s Scoring Now, But They Will Soon

We now know the story of the 2021-22 Boston Celtics won’t end when the regular season does. With their easy win over the Sacramento Kings on Friday night, the Celtics secured at least a play-in tournament appearance. They, one assumes, would rather skip over that particular hassle altogether and proceed directly into the NBA playoffs, something which will most likely require recent acquisition Derrick White to lift himself out of his dreadful shooting slump.

White made a bold first impression with his new team immediately after the San Antonio Spurs sent him packing at February’s trade deadline. In his debut, a 108-100 win over the Denver Nuggets, White impressed his new fanbase with a 15-point, six rebound performance. His presence seemed to provide a spark to a team that had finally started to truly play together before the trade deadline.

However, White promptly cooled off. At one point during a recent stretch, the guard missed 15 straight shots. While it’s been easy to overlook his offensive struggles while Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown are both playing at their current levels, it’s still concerning for a team that’s been desperate for additional shooting all season long.

In Friday’s game against the Kings, White managed just seven points in 31 minutes of playing time. That is about par for the course for White in his Celtics career. So far in a Boston uniform, he has managed a rather ghastly 22.3% from beyond the three-point line.

Now, luckily, White does so many other things well that he doesn’t have to be a major offensive factor for his team to win. A big reason the Celtics brought White in was for his defense and his skills as a ball distributor and he continues to impress in both respects. Also, Payton Pritchard has emerged—at least for now—as the team’s long-distance scoring threat from the bench, so the team won’t live or die on his three-point percentage.

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Still, if White doesn’t revert back to being a reliable shooter, it’s hard to see the Celtics maintaining their current winning pace. It will become even more important come the postseason when the competition gets tougher and head coaches tend to shorten their rotations. While White is currently Ime Udoka’s first choice off the bench, it’s hard to imagine him staying the de facto sixth man if he’s this cold when the games truly become life or death.

That wouldn’t be good news for the Celtics, who put up a rather healthy package for White’s services. In last month’s deal, the Celtics traded Josh Richardson, Romeo Langford, their number one pick this year and potentially a future pick. That’s not what you give up for a mere role player, which is what White has mostly been in Boston.

Of course, the Celtics’ deal wasn’t just for this year. The Celtics like how White could work with their current roster and hope that he will help going forward. It’s impossible to argue that he’s hurting their team success right now: in the 15 games since the trade deadline, the Celtics have gone 12-3 and have moved up to fourth place in the Eastern Conference.

So, the Celtics are currently rolling. If White absolutely had to have had an extended slump, it probably couldn’t have happened at a better time. That said, it would help all parties—most particularly White himself—if it didn’t last too much longer.