Don’t diminish victory

Celts proud of effort vs. Cavs

While most everyone is bending the curve to decipher the proper exchange rate on the Celtics’ Wednesday win over Cleveland, Marcus Smart would respectfully like folks to hold thine horses just a doggone minute.

It may be perfectly correct to characterize with perspective the 102-88 triumph by the team with the best record in the Eastern Conference over the one acknowledged as still far and away the team to beat on this side of the country.

Indeed, the Cavaliers were playing on the second night of a back-to-back against a Celtic group that had finally been able to come up for air after squeezing in 41 games to accommodate four-day breaks on either side of next Thursday’s game against the 76ers in London. Coach Tyronn Lue was dutifully saying there are no excuses, but, you know, hey, his Cavs are an older team and all that, so they feel the schedule more.

The Celtics were even feeding into the narrative, with Brad Stevens saying in his postgame press conference, “We’re not going to go out and overdo this. I mean, they were playing on the second night of a backto-back. We had a couple of days off; we looked fresh.”

Over in the Celtics dressing room, no one was declaring Goliath had been slayed. But nor were the lads willing to discount their accomplishment further than necessary.

When it was suggested to Smart that the Celts seemed to be taking this one a bit differently because of the Cleveland circumstances, he paused a moment.

“I’m going to say no,” Smart said, “because everybody’s played back-to-backs. We’ve played a lot of those. We’ve had to play some really good teams on the second night and tough it out.”

The most recent example came a week ago when the Celtics won in Charlotte on Wednesday and came back from 26 down to beat Houston by a point in the Garden on Thursday.

Perhaps recalling that muscle ache and fatigue, Smart then gave the Cavs a bit of slack.

“But it does play a part in it,” he said of the schedule. “I cannot lie. That backto-back is crazy, especially when you go out there and you give it everything you have and then you’ve got to come in and do it again with another good team. That’s tough.

“It’s tough mentally, physically, emotionally. But,” he added with a shrug, “you’ve just got to do it.”

And as regards the second night of those couplets, the 31-10 overall Celtics have done it better than the 2513 Cavaliers. Cleveland is 3-4 on the second night of a back-to-back, while the C’s are 4-3.

Still, it was clear the locals benefited from having New Year’s Day off and then getting in a rare practice Tuesday.

“We were able to actually get on the court and see it, do it, talk about it, mess up, mess up again, mess up again and then fix it and then we’ve got it,” said Smart. “So being able to have that practice day helped us a lot.”

And the Celtics are looking forward to the opportunity for a few more practices once they get past games against Minnesota (tonight at the Garden — with a reminder the start has been moved up to 7 p.m.) and the Nets (tomorrow in Brooklyn). Even the London itinerary will allow for ample workout time, and the C’s are prepared for the dividends of more rest and practice.

“Yeah, we are,” said Smart. “And that’s going to be big for us, just because we’ve been playing a lo-oo-t of games, a lot of games within one or two days of each other.

“It’s a wear and tear on your body, as everybody knows. It felt good to have just this little break between games here, and it’s going to feel even better to have those breaks after next week.”

The Celts certainly have some areas of their game that need tidying. Against the Cavs, however, they did show a crisper offense.

“We were just trying to get everybody involved, move the ball and make it easy on ourselves,” said Smart. “A lot of games, we make it tough on ourselves because, you know, one pass, one dribble and then shoot the ball, instead of moving it, getting (the opponents) moving, wearing them down and then driving or then shooting a wide-open shot. So that was our big emphasis, and we accomplished that.”

Defensively, they simply tried to cut off the Cavs’ flow.

“No leak-outs,” Smart said. “You know, that’s a team that usually gets one or two leak-outs a quarter, and those are easy buckets for them that you’ve got to try to control. Then we just wanted to make everything hard on them in the halfcourt.”

It will be hard on both sides should these teams meet again in the playoffs. The schedule will favor neither at that point.

Until then, the Celtics, while staging no parades for regular-season wins, would like you to be careful with the mark-downs.