The 2025-26 NBA season ended one game early for most of the Celtics’ top players.
With his team’s playoff seeding set, head coach Joe Mazzulla chose to sit nearly all of his regulars for Sunday’s regular-season finale against the Orlando Magic at TD Garden.
Boston’s long list of DNPs included all five starters (Derrick White, Jaylen Brown, Sam Hauser, Jayson Tatum and Neemias Queta), plus its top two bench players (Payton Pritchard and Nikola Vucevic). Rookie reserve wing Hugo Gonzalez, a late addition to the injury report, also was ruled out after being listed as questionable with a right foot bone bruise.
That left the second-seeded Celtics with eight available players against Orlando, just two of whom (wings Baylor Scheierman and Jordan Walsh) have spent consistent time in the starting lineup at any point this season. The rest of that group: guards Dalano Banton, Max Shulga and John Tonje, wing Ron Harper Jr., and bigs Luka Garza and Amari Williams.
Shulga, Tonje and Williams are rookies who were drafted 46th overall or lower. Banton just rejoined the team on Saturday, returning on a rest-of-season contract for his third stint with the C’s.
“I think you owe it to the guys that are playing,” Mazzulla said in his pregame news conference. “At the end of the day, these guys have helped us win in some particular game, or helped us go on a run. So I think you owe it to the guys to treat this as if it’s the most important game, because one, it’s the next one, and two, we have guys playing that have won for us and we will need to be impactful at some point in time.”
Here’s a glance at how each of Sunday’s eight nonparticipants fared for the Celtics this season:
Jaylen Brown
28.7 points, 6.9 rebounds, 5.1 assists, 1.0 steals, 47.7% shooting, 34.6% from three (71 games)
Just three Celtics players have matched or exceeded those averages for points, rebounds and assists in the same season: Larry Bird (twice), John Havlicek and now Brown, who built a compelling case for first-team All-NBA and could finish top-five in MVP voting.
Jayson Tatum
21.8 points, 10.0 rebounds, 5.3 assists, 1.4 steals, 41.1% shooting, 32.9% from three (16 games)
The Celtics have to be thrilled with how Tatum has looked since his March 6 return from Achilles surgery. He’s rebounded at an elite rate, improved as a shooter, regained much of his explosiveness, made plays defensively and shed his minutes restriction. Boston is 13-3 with Tatum in the lineup, and he should only improve as the playoffs get going.
Derrick White
16.5 points, 4.4 rebounds, 5.4 assists, 1.1 steals, 1.3 blocks, 39.4% shooting, 32.7% from three (77 games)
Though White struggled as a shooter throughout the season, he was one of the NBA’s best defenders (he finished two blocks shy of becoming the first in league history to block 100 shots and make 200 3-pointers) and most impactful players (fifth-best plus/minus). Opposing coaches regularly lauded the veteran guard for his all-around game.
Neemias Queta
10.2 points, 8.4 rebounds, 1.7 assists, 0.8 steals, 1.3 blocks, 65.3% shooting (76 games)
Queta, who should be a top candidate for Most Improved Player, registered more points, rebounds, assists, steals, blocks and minutes this season than he had in his first four NBA campaigns combined. He also finished fifth in the league in net rating.
Sam Hauser
9.2 points, 3.8 rebounds, 1.5 assists, 0.5 steals, 0.3 blocks, 41.9% shooting, 39.3% from three (78 games)
The streak is over. After shooting better than 40% from 3-point range in eight straight seasons (four in college, four in the NBA), Hauser just missed that mark in 2025-26. The veteran wing finished strong, though, making 52.6% of his threes in April and going 8-for-12 in Friday’s win over New Orleans.
Payton Pritchard
17.0 points, 3.9 assists, 5.2 rebounds, 0.7 steals, 46.4% shooting, 37.7% from three (79 games)
Shifted back into a sixth man role in early February, Pritchard averaged more points off the bench (17.2 per game) than he did in his 50 starts (16.9). He’s been one of the league’s top midrange operators, posting the fourth-best field-goal percentage between 8 and 16 feet among players with at least 100 such attempts. The rest of the top five: Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Nikola Jokic, Donovan Mitchell and Kevin Durant.
Nikola Vucevic
9.7 points, 6.6 rebounds, 2.0 assists, 0.4 steals, 0.6 blocks, 43.9% shooting, 34.0% from three (16 games with Boston)
The Celtics believe the week off before their first-round series will benefit Vucevic, who arrived from Chicago in a midseason trade and then missed a month with a fractured ring finger. Most of the veteran center’s best outings have come against weak competition, like his 14-point, 5-for-7 showing against the Pelicans. Boston has Garza waiting in the wings if Vucevic scuffles in the playoffs.
Hugo Gonzalez
3.9 points, 3.3 rebounds, 0.5 assists, 0.6 steals, 0.3 blocks, 47.6% shooting, 36.2% from three (74 games)
The only member of this octet who hasn’t looked like a lock for the playoff rotation, Gonzalez saw meaningful playing time in just one of Boston’s final seven games. But before that dip, he logged first-half minutes in 52 straight contests. All told, the 20-year-old played more than 1,000 minutes — the most by a Celtics rookie since Pritchard in 2020-21 — ranked third among 2025 draftees in plus-minus and posted a plus-11.9 net rating.