WALTHAM, Mass. — Marcus Thornton is the kind of basketball player fans love one night and hate the next.
He puts up shots. A lot of them. Sometimes, they go in. Other times, they don’t.
Thornton knows that his game is built on shooting. Luckily for him, his coach knows this, too.
“You play a role,” Boston Celtics head coach Brad Stevens said before Tuesday’s practice. “And his role is to score in bunches.”
Thornton did what he does best Monday night, chucking up 13 shots — including a game-high eight 3-pointers — in just 14 minutes of playing time in his first game with the Celtics. That flurry of jumpers yielded 14 points (12 from 3-point range) and helped spur Boston to a 98-78 blowout of the Philadelphia 76ers in its preseason opener.
“We needed all four of his made threes,” Stevens said. “That kind of kept us around in the first half, then kind of separated us in the second (half).”
As an off-the-bench, spark plug-type player, Thornton has the green light from his head coach to shoot from anywhere on the floor. The 27-year-old guard relishes this offensive freedom, which he says only Stevens and Paul Westphal, his coach with the Sacramento Kings from 2010 to 2012, have offered him.
“I love it,” said Thornton, who added that his favorite spot to shoot from is “anywhere.” “I’ve been a scorer all my life, and for Coach to have that confidence in me to put me out there … I’ll make mistakes but being able to fight through it. He knows I’m going to produce at the end of the day. It’s a great feeling.
“I feel like I have no pressure on me. I just go out there and play my game.”
Stevens knew what he was getting when the Celtics acquired Thornton from the Brooklyn Nets over the summer. After all, Thornton had torched one of Stevens’ squads in the past, when the then-LSU sophomore went off for 30 points in a win over the coach’s Butler Bulldogs in the 2009 NCAA tournament.
(Thornton also has victimized the Celtics before, albeit before Stevens’ tenure began. As C’s play-by-play man Sean Grande pointed out during Monday’s game, just three players scored 35 or more points against the 2011-12 Boston team that reached the Eastern Conference finals: LeBron James, Carmelo Anthony and Thornton.)
“Me and Coach have a lot of history, from the NCAA (tournament) game in college,” Thornton said. “He knows what I can do. For him to be able to just go out there and say, ‘Play your game. Do what you do.’ — man, it’s the best feeling in the world.”
Move over, Jordan Crawford. There’s a new gunslinger in town.
Photo via David Butler II/USA TODAY Sports Images
