In case you haven’t noticed, the 2023-24 Celtics shoot a lot of threes. The C’s are attempting a league-high 42.6 threes per game this season, three more than the second-placed Mavericks.
Boston’s “live-and-die-by-the-three” formula has worked for the most part, save for the few nights when it has backfired.
Tuesday’s loss to the Bucks was one of them. A whopping 52 of Boston’s 93 field goal attempts were from beyond the arc, as the team continued to resort to the long ball even when the shots were not falling (the Celtics hit just 17 of those 52 three-point attempts, 32.7%).
But that’s not why Joe Mazzulla’s squad made history.
The Celtics on Tuesday became the first NBA team in history to go an entire game without attempting a free throw. They broke the previous record set by the 2013-14 Grizzlies and 2017-18 Hawks who attempted just one free throw in a game, per ESPN Stats & Information.