Chris Cenac Jr. checked into a 35-point blowout with the Garden already doing Gino Time, and in five minutes against a Bulls team that had long since stopped trying, he drilled a three-pointer on his first NBA attempt. It was a fun moment, though one shot is too small a sample to justify a bigger role for him.
What actually happened: Cenac entered in the fourth quarter with Boston up by dozens of points, against Chicago reserves who had no reason to play defense with any urgency. He took two shots. He made one, a three, and missed the other. That's the entire NBA body of work being used to argue he's earned real minutes on a Celtics roster still deep with veterans ahead of him. One make in garbage time tells you a 19-year-old rookie can shoot a basketball. It tells you nothing about whether he can guard an NBA power forward with a scouting report, or hold up when the possession actually matters.
The Summer League flashes are a fairer data point, and they matter more than five minutes against Chicago, because they came with real reps attached. But that's still a smaller, lower-stakes stage than the regular season, and the flashes haven't added up to sustained proof yet. Boston's front office took him in the first round because they liked the tools. Liking the tools and trusting him in a tight fourth quarter against a team still fighting for playoff positioning are two different decisions, and Joe Mazzulla's staff would be reckless to conflate them off one shot against a team that had quit.
Rating
RatingThe instinct to want it anyway makes sense. Boston blew a team out by 35, the bench scored, and after a shaky start to the season it felt good to watch a young player do something exciting. That feeling is real. It's also exactly how teams talk themselves into playing rookies out of position before they're ready, then wonder why the rookie looks lost once the minutes stop being free.
Mike Conley is the better test case for how crowded this rotation actually is. The 39-year-old veteran also made his season debut in that same fourth quarter, and he knocked down both of his three-point attempts. If a player with Conley's track record is still fighting for fourth-quarter minutes on this roster, a rookie who's played five total minutes has no case to leapfrog him, no matter how clean the stroke looked.
RTGCenac should still get more run soon enough, but the bar for earning real rotation minutes on a team this deep is higher than one three-pointer against a team that had already packed it in. Anyone arguing otherwise is grading the shot and ignoring who it came against.
