Jordan Walsh is entering an in-between stage of his Celtics career.
He’s 22 years old, which still makes him young enough to be discussed alongside Boston’s latest batch of developmental players. He’s also entering Year 4, wasn’t part of Boston’s Summer League group this July, has already been around a championship team and can casually cite things he learned from Jrue Holiday as part of his basketball education.
He’s not exactly the new kid anymore, but he’s also not Derrick White or Neemias Queta, whose places in the rotation are considerably easier to picture before the games even start.
That leaves Walsh somewhere in between. Listening to him at Media Day, he seems pretty aware of it.
“I’m trying to switch my mentality to having what I call a high role player IQ,” Walsh said, “of just affecting the game in ways without the ball basically.”
That phrase gets at what Year 4 probably needs to be for Walsh.
For most young players, development is easy to imagine in terms of adding things. Improve the jumper. Tighten the handle. Bulk up. Learn another counter.
Walsh certainly still has plenty to improve, but there’s a different challenge waiting for him now. The Celtics aren’t going to hand him the ball for 15 possessions and ask him to show them everything he worked on over the summer. If he earns real minutes, most of them will come while Jayson Tatum, Derrick White, Payton Pritchard or Paul George are doing considerably more attention-grabbing things with the basketball.
Walsh has to figure out how to matter anyway.
“I think the biggest thing that I’ve been working on is affecting the game without the ball, primarily on offense,” he said. “Trying to sprint the floor, trying to get in transition, trying to run and be an outlet guy, get on cuts.”
There’s nothing particularly glamorous in that list. There also might be a career hiding inside it.
The little things eventually become the job
During Media Day, Walsh brought up Holiday when he was asked where the idea of “role player IQ” came from.
“I felt like Jrue Holiday was a big piece of that, big representative of that,” Walsh said. “I’ve tried to take as much as I can from him, obviously on the defensive side.”
That makes immediate sense. Holiday is one of the best defenders of his generation, and Walsh entered the league with defense as the easiest way to imagine him sticking around.
But Walsh’s answer quickly moved beyond defense.
He talked about watching film and recognizing that the Celtics were better when players understood where the offense actually needed to go. In the previous version of this team, that often meant doing something that made life easier for Tatum or Jaylen Brown.
“Guys like Jayson Tatum and JB have to have the ball in their hands,” Walsh said. “So whether it’s going to find them on a pin-down screen or, like, passing up my shot to get them a shot, stuff like that is kind of just stuff I keep seeing.”
That’s the part of NBA role-playing that can be hard to appreciate from the outside. Plenty of players can tell you what their role is. “Defend, run the floor, hit open shots” has probably appeared in approximately 40,000 Media Day interviews in the past few years.
Actually becoming useful inside that role? That’s much more complicated.
Can you recognize when cutting clears the lane for someone else? Can you make a defense pay for ignoring you without hijacking a possession? Can you screen somebody open and immediately find the next useful place to be? If Tatum gets doubled, are you standing where the next pass needs to go before it gets there?
Walsh has spent three years close enough to winning basketball to see what those decisions look like. Now he needs to make enough of them himself in order for Joe Mazzulla to trust him.
The physical stuff has never been especially mysterious with Walsh. He’s long, athletic and switchable, and when his energy is pointed in the right direction, he can make possessions uncomfortable in ways that are difficult to teach.
His offensive fit has always required a little more imagination.
Walsh sounded pretty confident about one important part of that equation Monday.
“I feel like I’ve come a long way with my three-point shot,” he said. “I feel like if I’m open and I catch the ball, it’s going in. And I feel like my team feels that way and I feel like the coaches and staff feel that way too.”
If defenses eventually feel that way too, Walsh becomes a lot more useful.
And if defenses have to respect him on the perimeter, a hard closeout suddenly gives him somewhere to send all that athleticism. He talked about attacking downhill, kicking the ball out, cutting after the pass, screening and slipping. Basically, making himself part of the possession instead of waiting for the possession to find him.
That may fit this version of the Celtics better than the previous one.
Walsh described Boston’s old offense pretty plainly: “swing the ball, stand still, watch JT ISO, watch JB ISO, set a ball screen, ISO.”
It wasn’t really a criticism. When you have Tatum and Brown on your team, watching Tatum and Brown do things is often a pretty good offensive strategy.
But Walsh believes Mazzulla wants this team playing with more movement and more interchangeable bursts of energy.
“What Joe wants is it to be more of a five in, five out type of rotation where it’s like we’re all going super hard, four or five minutes, boom, switch out, come in, new five, and then fight, fight, fight for four or five minutes.”
For a player trying to build a career out of activity, that sounds like a pretty decent invitation.
The prospect phase is over
Walsh has also lived through enough change in Boston to recognize how different the room feels now. He talked about Al Horford and Luke Kornet being gone and how much the environment around him has changed.
“It feels completely different,” Walsh said. “It feels new. It feels fresh.”
Then he landed on the word that probably matters most to him.
“Opportunity.”
“I feel like a lot of the guys here who haven’t made a name for themselves, like me, have an opportunity here to take a chance at carving out a role, carving out, you know, a career,” Walsh said. “You can feel that in the air.”
Walsh has been in Boston long enough that “potential” can’t carry the whole conversation anymore. He knows what championship teammates look like up close. He’s had enough NBA minutes to understand how much harder it is to stay on the floor than it is to flash something interesting for three possessions.
And yet, at 22, there’s still plenty of runway left if he can put the pieces together.
Maybe that’s what Walsh means by “high role player IQ.” He isn’t trying to reinvent his game so much as make the game he already has easier to fit alongside his teammates.
The Celtics already know he can defend. They know he can run. Walsh believes the jumper is better than it has ever been. Now comes the harder part: knowing what to do during all the basketball happening in between.
Walsh already knows the role. Year 4 is about proving he knows how to be the player who fills it.
