C’s make lane change
Tighten up ‘D’ in paint for road win
DETROIT — Kyrie Irving’s communication took on a new form yesterday. In addition to his usual forms of guidance and suggestion, the Celtics guard had a message in his fashion choice.
Emblazoned across the blue Tshirt he wore to the game was the word “DEFEND.”
Point taken. Or, rather, points taken away.
Thirteen days after surrendering their season high of 118 in a 10-point loss to Detroit back at the Garden, the Celtics gave up a season low while putting down the Pistons, 91-81, yesterday.
The C’s clogged up the painted area in Detroit’s new downtown arena, holding the Pistons to 33.3 percent from the floor and preventing a second Andre Drummond explosion against them. The Motor City center had 26 points on 10-for12 shooting in Boston on Nov. 27, but here he had six points on just 1-for5 from the floor. That’s because he had company. A lot of it.
“Quite a bit,” said coach Brad Stevens on how much the C’s changed the defensive approach from the last meeting. “I thought, hey, they missed some open shots that they made at our place, so maybe that feels better than it was; we’ll go back and look and see if it was effective or not. But it felt like we did a much better job at least protecting the paint tonight then we did in Game 1.”
The Pistons got into the Garden lane for 54 points two weeks ago. Yesterday they scored just 26 there.
The idea was to slow the flow of lobs to Drummond, who still made his presence felt with 15 rebounds. Aron Baynes got as physical as possible with his old teammate, and he had help.
“A lot of times it was Baynes that obviously was backing up into that,” said Stevens after his club bettered the 86 points they allowed Sacramento on Nov.1, “but he was handling the dribble handoffs, so it was other guys behind him stopping the lob. So they’ve got to make sure, and we talked about, as Drummond rolls, we have to have bodies there. And then they put you in that issue of then you’re late closing out to (Tobias) Harris or you’re late closing out to (Anthony) Tolliver, which we found ourselves (in) some. And then you have to make sure that if we need to adjust further we can.”
Said Baynes, who matched Drummond’s six points and had a season-high 13 rebounds, “We were locked in. Our offense wasn’t as crisp tonight as we wanted it to be, but defensively we had a game plan and we stuck with it. We were trying to pack the paint and make them make plays from outside. Last time they really had whatever they wanted from inside the paint, so tonight we wanted to go out there and try to control it a lot better. We had five guys working on a string for most of the night, which is always fun to play defense like that.”
The Celtics shot just 41.8 percent themselves, but Al Horford, coming back from a 1-for-6, two-point night in San Antonio, had 18 points, and an unmasked Irving added 16 as the C’s moved to 23-5. It was the Pistons’ sixth straight loss after a 14-6 start.
Irving missed eight of his 12 shots, but he didn’t miss the mask he’s been wearing to protect a facial fracture.
“Nah,” he said, “I was happy to see the whole arena. I was excited to be able to see everything.”
The Celts seemed to have this one well in hand with a 16-point lead and fewer than nine minutes remaining. But the Pistons went for the next 12 points as the C’s missed open shots and the home team added a little urgency to its game.
The Celtics then came out of a timeout with Irving isolating on old friend Avery Bradley. The former Celt blocked Irving’s jumper, but Jaylen Brown, Horford and Jayson Tatum hit on three of the Celtics’ next four possessions — the latter two 3-pointers, and the outcome was removed from doubt.
The Celts thus responded from the 105-102 loss to the Spurs and now haven’t fallen in consecutive games since the first two of the season. Irving had a good explanation. “It sucks losing,” he said. “I don’t think that we necessarily hold our head on one loss. We really just move on as best we can, and Brad does an unbelievable job of doing that and making sure that he echoes that when we’re coming in for film the next day. We’re as transparent as possible in terms of what we want to accomplish the next game. We watch film on what we can do better (than) the last game, how it makes sense going into the next game and for future games. And then we watch the team’s edit. And then we go out there and we walk through out. And just, the attention to detail’s at an all-time high. So we know if you’re not doing your job, you’re getting subbed out. And if you’re not aware of what’s going on for us as a team, then it’s pretty much going to show. So we all just try to remind each other and demand excellence.”
So far, so good.