Enes Kanter scored eighteen points in the first half of this game, most of them on hustle buckets (offensive rebounds and the like). You can crow all you want about Kanter’s lack of defensive ability, but you can’t ignore his ability to make bitchmeat out of opposing centers on his way to grabbing five hundred offensive rebounds. Nobody on the Lakers could keep him off the glass. At all. Dwight Howard was reduced to a lesser version of himself known as Flight Coward, so-called because his response to “fight or flight” situations was “flight”, and he was a major coward in trying to prevent Kanter from dominating inside.
Then Kanter went scoreless in the second half, and what was shaping up to be his best game as a Celtic ended with him not even scoring twenty points. The Celtics didn’t exactly need him to step up in the second half (they blew out the Lakers by 39 and television cameras later caught LeBron James searching “how to get traded to Milwaukee” on his phone), but it would have been cool for Kanter to have one of his dominating scoring/rebounding performances like he would have during his OKC days.
The Celtics don’t need to make any adjustments after soundly beating one of the best teams in the NBA, but if they wanted to make an adjustment, here’s one: try passing the ball to Kanter rather than him having to generate all of his points off your bricks.