The Celtics have settled into a starting five of Derrick White, Sam Hauser, Jaylen Brown, Jayson Tatum and Neemias Queta, with Payton Pritchard providing starter minutes off the bench. But Boston is not going to get through every playoff minute with only eight players, and the path to a larger rotation now appears to run through Jordan Walsh.
Walsh has been acting as the ninth man recently, the next wing off the bench after Baylor Scheierman. For most of the season, Hugo Gonzalez looked like the next player up, but he has been out of the rotation for the last couple of weeks. In that span, Walsh has gone from an in-and-out option to the one wing Boston has leaned on when it needs another body.
That matters now because the Celtics are in the final week of the regular season and have already started to telegraph what their playoff rotation could look like. Boston has settled into something close to an eight-man playoff-style group, with one backup center in Luka Garza or Nikola Vucevic and one backup wing in Scheierman, but the team is expected to have to work in at least one other player in the postseason.
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Walsh’s case has been uneven all year, which is part of what makes this stretch worth watching. At times, he has looked like one of Boston’s best three-and-D options. At other times, he has piled up DNP-CDs and disappeared from the lineup entirely. The Celtics do not have many clean answers behind their core, so the fact that Walsh has moved into the ninth-man role suggests he has at least momentarily passed Gonzalez in the pecking order.
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That does not lock in anything for the playoffs, but it does show where the Celtics are trying to land. Boston can survive with a tight rotation for stretches, yet the demands of a playoff series make it hard to trust only eight players every night. If the current pattern holds, Walsh is the most likely name to bridge the gap when the Celtics need one more wing.
