Celts let air out of any big-game hype

HOUSTON — Kyrie Irving laughed when he was asked yesterday morning about the “magnitude” of last night’s game between the Celtics, No. 2 in the Eastern Conference, and the Westleading Rockets.

“The magnitude?” said Irving with a laugh. “I don’t know. Like you said, I think I’ll leave that for everybody else. It’s just regular season, man. It’s just another game, honestly.”

Not according to the hype. The game was nationally televised as part of ABC’s prime time “Saturday Showcase,” and that meant numerous ads leading into the contest.

When it was over, the Rockets held on for a 123-120 win over the Celtics.

Coach Brad Stevens wasn’t buying into any added import, but he had enough perspective to appreciate the larger meaning for the Celts.

“Every game is broadcast,” Stevens said. “Every game is televised. Every highlight is seen; every non-highlight is seen. So at the end of the day it all kind of runs together when you’re in the midst of it.

“But it’s great to be targeted at the beginning of the year — because that’s when they make these schedules — to play on these games. So it’s one of the things we talked about with the Christmas Day games, but that’s a result of you’d better have a good team, or a team that you think might be good, to have a chance to do those things.”

Of a more pressing nature for the C’s is getting their game together in these last few weeks of the season. According to Irving, it comes down to consistency.

“There’s a lot of details throughout the game, just from an individual perspective, just staying poised, staying composed, understanding what the game plan is and sticking to it,” he said. “Obviously there are going to be a lot of mistakes that go out throughout the game, but you want to limit those to as few as possible, especially going against the elite teams.

“I think that our margin for error is just... We don’t have the same luxury as other teams. We hang our hat on defense, but that just has to be our staple consistently. That’s basically it.”

Irving and the C’s would like to avoid some of the variations that have accompanied their season, in which a 16-game win streak is followed later by a 6-9 stretch leading into the All-Star break.

“When it’s so new, it’s part of it,” he said. “I think that sometimes people can jump the gun and that’s part of the media and like giving a lot of the teams the glory before they deserve it. That probably goes into it before, honestly, any type of stage is built for that team to be on.

“It’s just the regular season. It’s made for ups and downs. It’s made for going through a lot of things that you’ll see in the playoffs. If you see it as that, then you don’t really get caught up in it. We just want to find that consistency, that’s all.”

Stevens, therefore, wasn’t looking at a big matchup with the Rockets as anything too much out of the ordinary.

“Every game is important to play up to your standards,” he said. “It’s not about who you’re playing against; it’s about how you want to play. In this league, winning is really hard, and certainly this is a great test because every possession matters so much because of how good they are at both ends of the court. I think it’s whoever you’re playing right now, whatever you’re doing in practice, it’s got to be about playing up to the standards that you want to play to.”

Irving spoke about the playoffs and added, “Some games they give you glimpses of it, but it’s just the regular season. It’s a good test for us.”