The headliners of the Celtics’ current roster — the Jayson Tatums, Jaylen Browns, Derrick Whites and Payton Pritchards — are seasoned pros with championship experience. Four-fifths of their current starting lineup and their sixth man were rotation players on the 2024 title-winning team.
But when the NBA postseason tips off next month, several of Boston’s key contributors will be experiencing the pressure of that stage for the first time.
Though it’s unclear exactly how head coach Joe Mazzulla will structure his playoff rotation, it likely will feature at least three postseason neophytes: starting center Neemias Queta, second-year wing Baylor Scheierman and the Celtics’ youngest player, first-round rookie Hugo Gonzalez.
“I’m super excited,” Gonzalez said Tuesday at a Celtics community event promoting financial literacy. “I think that obviously is what you play for. Obviously, you’ve got to reach there, (have) a great regular season, but you, at the end of the day, play for the playoffs and you play for winning it. So I think that it’s something that you’re looking forward to every single day, now even more that the regular season is almost over. You’re just looking forward to the playoffs and looking forward to making a great run.”
Gonzalez’s playing time fluctuates more than any other Celtics regular — this month alone, it’s peaked at 35 minutes in his 18-point, 16-rebound, five-stock masterclass against Milwaukee and bottomed out at seven in a win over Cleveland six days later — but he has appeared in every game since Nov. 29. The 20-year-old, high-energy Spaniard has remained in the mix even after Tatum’s return from Achilles surgery pushed fellow reserve wing Jordan Walsh out of the rotation, with Mazzulla often deploying him against the opponent’s top scoring threat.
The list of NBA stars Gonzalez has guarded this season includes Cade Cunningham, Luka Doncic, Jalen Brunson, Tyrese Maxey, Donovan Mitchell, Kevin Durant, James Harden and two recent NBA MVPs, Giannis Antetokounmpo and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. No Celtics defender spent more time matched up against Antetokounmpo when Boston visited the Bucks on March 2, per NBA player tracking, or against Gilgeous-Alexander during the team’s narrow loss at Oklahoma City on March 12.
The prominence of his role is rare for a first-year player in Boston, at least in the franchise’s current era of perennial contention. Gonzalez already has logged the most minutes (1,007 entering Wednesday’s rematch with the Thunder at TD Garden) of any Celtics rookie since Pritchard in 2020-21, and he’s on pace to appear in the most games by a C’s rookie since Tatum in 2017-18.
Whereas Pritchard played four years of college basketball, and Tatum was a generational talent drafted third overall, Gonzalez joined the Celtics as a teenager who played sparingly last season on a powerhouse Real Madrid squad, making his rookie resume all the more remarkable.
“I think he is getting better and better,” Mazzulla told reporters last month. “… Understand what his role is for us, understand how to do that every night. It is not an easy role to play, especially for the young guys. I think he is just continuing to get better with that.”
In a way, Gonzalez’s final year with Real Madrid served as a preview of his first NBA campaign. He ranked 14th on that team in minutes per game, averaging 3.5 points and 1.9 rebounds as the young kid on a roster stacked with NBA alumni. Real Madrid won the championship of Spain’s domestic league hours before Boston drafted Gonzalez 28th overall last June.
This season, Gonzalez ranks 11th among current Celtics in minutes per game, and his modest box-score stats (4.0 points, 3.5 rebounds, 0.6 steals) don’t accurately reflect his impact. He entered Wednesday with the second-best plus/minus in his draft class behind NBA Rookie of the Year favorite Kon Knueppel, and the fourth-best net rating in the league behind Victor Wembanyama, Gilgeous-Alexander and Chet Holmgren.
“Obviously, everything helps,” said Gonzalez, who came up through Real Madrid’s academy system. “I think that there’s nothing that just pushes you back. That’s just new information for the future. Obviously, (nobody) wants to not have consistent playing time … but that also can be a lesson in any day — two years, three years, 10 years forward. I think it’s just popped right now to me. Like, maybe you’re not getting consistent minutes now, but maybe you get it tomorrow. So that lesson that I got at Real Madrid last season has helped me a lot this season.”
The last time a Celtics rookie played meaningful playoff minutes was in 2021 (Pritchard and Aaron Nesmith), the only season in the last nine in which Boston failed to advance past the first round. An opening-round exit would be a disappointment for this year’s team, which overcame its offseason roster overhaul and Tatum’s 10-month absence thanks in large part to the emergence of previously unproven players like Queta, Scheierman, Gonzalez, Walsh, Luka Garza and Ron Harper Jr.
That sextet has combined for 120 career postseason minutes, all of them in garbage time.
“We take care of every single loss that we have, and we try to improve from there,” Gonzalez said. “We don’t take it for granted, because we’re not any kind of losing team. We want to win every single game, and for that, you’ve got to know what you do bad and where you can improve from there so then you can succeed.”