BOSTON \u2014 Heat coach Erik Spoelstra has spent a lot of time watching Celtics guard Derrick White during his career, including with Team USA as a coach during the 2024 Olympics. <\/p>\n
After witnessing White erupt for a career-high nine 3-point makes in the Celtics 129-116 win over the Heat at TD Garden on Friday night, the longest tenured NBA coach shared a special kind of praise about the veteran guard. <\/p>\n
\u2018I think he\u2019s the most underrated player in the league,\u201d Spoelstra said. \u201cHe\u2019s an absolute winner no matter what role you put him in. Tonight, obviously, he showed that he could be a scorer in all the different facets from 3, pick and roll mistakes, taking one on one opportunities against a perceived mismatch, but defensively he does so many things. <\/p>\n
\u201cThere were a lot of opportunities we had in the paint. He stripped down, I think he\u2019s the best shot blocking guard in the league. If you have all your talent out there like we had in USA basketball, he can just fit in, you know, and find a way to make winning plays, and he certainly did that tonight.\u201d<\/p>\n
White finished with a game-high 33 points in the win, shooting 11-of-20 from the field and 9-of-14 from 3-point range in the 13-point win. He also was a plus-27 in the victory, leading Boston\u2019s dominant fourth quarter charge to help break open a tight contest through three quarters. <\/p>\n
\u201cFelt good from the beginning,\u201d White said. \u201cI think I made the first shot, and then just tried to keep it rolling from there.\u201d<\/p>\n
Defensively, White also had a game-high four blocks to help Boston maintain some rim protection despite playing small ball for nearly half the game. Miami struggled to finish at the rim (40 percent from 2-point range) thanks to Boston\u2019s strong contests led by White. Offensively, the team\u2019s shotmaking took off late once White caught fire from 3-point range.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou just trust the process, get the looks that we were getting, kind of trying to figure out, like, what they want to do defensively,\u201d White said. \u201cAnd obviously, Miami does a pretty good job of forcing turnovers and being aggressive, so seeing what they were doing defensively, and then I feel like by the fourth quarter, we kind of figured out some things and were able to get some good looks. And then it helps when you make them.\u201d<\/p>\n
White has now scored 20 or more points in five of his last seven games and will look to continue that momentum on Saturday night when the Celtics play the Raptors in Toronto. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"BOSTON \u2014 Heat coach Erik Spoelstra has spent a lot of time watching Celtics guard Derrick White during…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":360027,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64],"tags":[355,99],"class_list":{"0":"post-360026","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nba","8":"tag-nba","9":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360026","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=360026"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360026\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/360027"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=360026"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=360026"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=360026"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}