Court Sense: No party like a West Coast party

Yes, obviously, of course the Celtics need Jayson Tatum. But how deep is this basketball team?

The Tatum-less Celtics torched the Suns in Phoenix on Wednesday night, taking care of business as their superstar sat as a precaution after an ankle injury earlier this week.

Boston came out firing, hitting seven 3-pointers in the first five minutes, before dominating the second and third quarters en route to a 30-point rout. Kristaps Porzingis stayed hot with a 30-point night on 10 of 15 shooting from the floor and a red-hot 4 of 5 from deep, plus eight rebounds and a couple blocks because, sure, it makes sense for that guy to be a team’s third-best player.

But the real star of this road trip? Baylor dadgum Scheierman, who continued his antics Wednesday with a behind-the-back fake into a no-look drop pass that would have made Rajon Rondo blush.

(Did Scheierman travel there? One thousand percent. But superstar players get superstar calls!)

I’ve made my fair share of jokes about Scheierman over the last couple weeks but if the Celtics have really found another serviceable bench option from nowhere, Brad Stevens and Danny Ainge might need to be jointly tried for witchcraft.

The Suns never really stood a chance after the Celtics held a 25-point lead before halftime, but that didn’t stop Jaylen Brown from being downright mean with his drives when Phoenix pieced together the tiniest little run in the third quarter.

A dominant win in Phoenix makes seven in a row (and 12 of the last 13) for the defending champs, tying Boston’s best run of the year. The Celtics have won these last four games out West by a combined 83 points, making those wonky weeks in December and January feel like a distant memory.

Perhaps the Celtics were just eager to impress new boss Bill Chisholm, who was in attendance to see his new basketball team for the first time since the Globe’s Adam Himmelsbach broke the news of the franchise’s sale last week.Stevens said “it was really clear how much [Chisholm] loves the Celtics and how much it means to him,” which is good, considering the amount of money Chisholm will need to spend to keep intact this unreasonably deep and talented basketball team.

In any case: Since a Jan. 27 defeat to the Rockets at the buzzer Boston is 22-4, looking much more like those defending champs with just over two weeks until playoff time.

The only real worry about these Celtics is health, and short of a few scrapes and bruises, things have been largely positive on that front: Porzingis looks well and truly back to his best after his mystery illness, Jrue Holiday is back to a full workload after a finger injury, and Tatum could return as soon as this weekend from that ankle scare. All seems well in Celtics land. Perhaps too well. Maybe knock on some wood if you have any available.

Let’s get into it.

By Adam Himmelsbach

Shaking my notebook up and down and seeing what falls out as the Celtics prepare to wrap up their last long road trip of the regular season with games against the Spurs and Grizzlies . . .

▪ Jaylen Brown revealed after Wednesday’s win over the Suns that he is on a minutes restriction as he works to manage a bone bruise on his left knee. He did not reach the 30-minute mark in either of his first two games back, and he said he will manage the injury over the final few weeks of the regular season in hopes of being fully healthy for the playoffs.

“We’ll see,” Brown said. “It’s new for me. I haven’t really had issues with my knees ever in my career, so just trying to find a good routine to make sure I’m prepared and ready to go every night. But it’s definitely been a challenge mentally.”

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Other top stories we’re watching ...

• No Tatum, no problem: Boston was dominant in Phoenix without its star. Adam Himmelsbach has more from Phoenix.
• Quite a few questions remain about the Celtics’ record sale. Michael Silverman has some answers.
• Brad Stevens had some time to chat with Chisholm this week with the new boss attending Monday’s game. Here’s what Stevens had to say.

Congrats to Jayson Tatum, a first-time winner of the Joe Mazzulla Quote of the Week, but really Joe Mazzulla, a many-time winner of the Joe Mazzulla Quote of the Week.Tatum was the latest Celtic to drop a wonderful anecdote about the Celtics’ enigmatic coach, with Boston’s star appearing on the “New Heights” podcast with Jason and Travis Kelce.Tatum relayed a story about a technical foul he picked up in Portland, with the ensuing conversation with Mazzulla going off the rails in a hurry.“Joe is crazy,” Tatum said. “Joe comes up to me after the game — if you get like 16 or 17 techs, you get suspended for a game — Joe’s like: ‘can you just get four more so you can suspended?‘“[Mazzulla’s] like: ‘I would much rather you just come punch me. I want to fight. When Travis Kelce ran into Andy Reid — do that to me.‘“One of a kind, folks. One of a kind.

Big (and also strange!) week for LeBron James. James did something unusual on Wednesday, sitting down with ESPN’s Pat McAfee for a extraordinarily open and wide-ranging interview that is genuinely the most candid James has been in this sort of format, probably ever.LeBron does not give interviews like this. Ever. So it was remarkable to watch him go off the cuff about all sorts of topics before, eventually, kickstarting a beef with ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith (no, I’m not going to subject you to any further details about that).Highlights included:

• Jokingly (or maybe not) accusing the NBA of rigging multiple draft lotteries;
• Some surprisingly open comments about his relationship with Michael Jordan, with whom he has been compared ad nauseam since, like, the Bush Administration;
• Claiming he has, in fact, read all of the books that people have joked he doesn’t actually read because he’s always photographed reading the opening pages;
• Confirming a decade-old rumor about a rift emerging between him and Pat Riley during James’s time with the Heat as a result of Riley cutting off players’ access to cookies on team flights;
• And truly so, so much more.

Now, I don’t think the appetite for LeBron (or Pat McAfee) content is that high among this newsletter’s readership.So instead, I’ll move along to later that same evening, when after all that, James played one of the worst games of his career, then saved the Lakers with a last-second buzzer-beating tip-in.And after all that, James and the Lakers were involved in, truly, one of the wildest endings to an NBA game in recent memory the following night.For those of you who haven’t seen it, I am not going to spoil it for you, I think you should just take three minutes and watch it for yourself. It is absolutely remarkable.

The Celtics are off Friday before facing the Spurs in San Antonio Saturday (8 p.m., NBC Sports Boston).

See the full Celtics schedule here.

This story first appeared in Court Sense, a biweekly Celtics newsletter from Boston Globe Sports. Click here to join the fun.

Amin Touri can be reached at amin.touri@globe.com.