Stevens works puzzle
Injuries necessitate constant tinkering
It would have been nice for Brad Stevens if Kyrie Irving was ready to return tonight when the Celtics host Oklahoma City. But that’s not going to happen.
As Stevens has built recent lineups, he has put together a jigsaw puzzle only to watch it get ruined. Then he puts it back together again. Irving has played just a game and a half in the past six, with Jaylen Brown, Marcus Smart, Daniel Theis out and Al Horford missing two games last week because of illness.
The result has been three losses in the past four games after a 6-1 start coming out of All-Star break.
As he flew back to Boston from New Orleans late Sunday night, Stevens was forced to examine his rotation again and decipher the right combinations.
The process is fairly deliberate.
“We have to look at what each guy that’s available does best, and we have to redistribute the responsibility,” Stevens said. “I think that’s what you have to do when you have injuries, and I thought we actually did a pretty good job of that the other night (in a double-overtime loss to Washington), but there is more responsibility to do what you do best when other guys are missing.”
The study is not just on what each player can do, but how long he will be needed to do it. With that in mind, Stevens can look at how much he wants to alter his schemes.
“I think one of the things is you have to weigh potential long-term misses versus a guy like Kyrie that might be out day-to-day because you’re not going to overhaul what you’re doing if you’re going to get a guy back right away,” the coach said. “But in a guy like Theis’ case, we take out a little bit of the menu of what we did offensively and defensively because it fit his strengths, especially with the second unit. So you put in more of what fits (Greg) Monroe’s strengths.
“You’re thinking about all that stuff. (Against the Wizards), we obviously started big because playing against that lineup, it was very, very difficult. That first unit for Washington’s been great, even without (John) Wall, for the last couple of months. But we’ll look at each game and figure out how best to play with the guys we have.”
Sometimes good can come out of a bad situation. When Terry Rozier started three games in place of Irving at the end of January and beginning of February, it set him on a run of 19 straight games scoring in double figures.
“I don’t think you learn about their strengths, but I think you learn about how they respond to that situation, how they respond to that added responsibility,” Stevens said. “I think Terry would be the first to tell you that by the third game of starting three games in a row and playing all those minutes that it was like wow, this hits you. That added responsibility’s difficult.
“But he handled it great, and he continues to handle it great. We’re really fortunate to be in the situation we are that, you know, Kyrie’s out right now, Smart’s out, and you’ve got Terry and Shane (Larkin) who are good players that can run the point for you.”
With his top two scorers out — Irving at 24.4 points per game, Brown at 14.1 — Stevens has had to look to others. And while he recognizes the difficulty in that, evidenced by scoring 92 points in Orlando and 89 in New Orleans, he believes even the rookies from deeper down the bench who have been pressed into action have the capacity to come through.
“We’re 70 games in, and whether you’re a rookie or a 10th-year player, you know your role,” Stevens said. “You know your expectation, and we need them to do it.
“And if we don’t, then our margin gets severely decreased. And with some of our scoring issues in the last couple of games, we’re not going to have a huge margin, so we’re going to have to take care of those things we can control.”