Big Green thoughts
Lots to look for in first tap
The Celtics will play a preseason game tonight. Finally.
I mean, they’ve already been through the tedium of two whole days’ worth of practices. Yesterday was a well-deserved break of sorts as they flew south to meet the Hornets at the University of North Carolina and, darn, they must have been tired as they settled onto the plane.
OK, so now we’ll turn off the Sarcasm-atron 2000 and recognize how odd it is to play a game so quickly after the start of training camp. Just know that this is the way Brad Stevens preferred it. With camps’ duration cut back to stretch the regular season schedule and allow for fewer back-to-backs and the like, the C’s coach chose to front-load the four exhibition games and have 10 days from the last of these until the season-opener against Philadelphia on Oct.16.
That last stretch will be the true training camp. These games, Stevens has said, will be treated essentially as practices. It will, therefore, be hard to draw any comprehensive conclusions from the Celts’ play between tonight and next Saturday’s preseason finale in Cleveland.
But here are six things we will be looking for this evening:
• Having gotten to see Gordon Hayward for all of five minutes and 15 seconds last season before he suffered an horrific lower leg injury, it will be interesting to see how he’s moving in the first game with brighter lights and referees and a crowd.
It may be natural for the All-Star forward to be slightly tentative as he takes the floor, and certainly it won’t set off any alarms if his cuts aren’t as crisp as normal or if he’s a split-second slow to the ball. But if there is no visible difference in his movements and overall comfort with the game, it would speak very well to the pace of his return and be a nice payoff from the months of rehab.
• Kyrie Irving’s seasonending surgery wasn’t as traumatic in nature as Hayward’s injury. And, by all accounts, he’s been just fine physically in camp and in the pickup games that preceded it. What we’re interested in more is how he runs the show.
This will be a long process as the Celtics, in their current configuration, learn themselves. Though the faces are the same, this is a different team Irving will be directing from the point this year. The young people are better, having gotten a year’s worth of experience all the way through a Game 7 of the Eastern Conference finals.
Irving is a willing distributor, but he is also one of the best individual scorers in the NBA. Beginning tonight, it will be fun to watch how he strikes the balance between when to give it up and when to go.
• In that it won’t be a regular game rotation, it will be hard to get a handle on how Stevens will use his bigs. But if Al Horford is going to play mainly at center, we’ll be curious to see how Aron Baynes and Daniel Theis are able to find their respective grooves. Both were better than advertised last season. And while Theis may be a bit off as he comes back from knee surgery, they need to be able to work well together with the second group — unless one of them gets a spot start based on matchups for a given game.
• Call me crazy, but I want to see Marcus Smart shoot. We know he’s going to take some treys that don’t show up on the game plan, and the Celts have learned to live with the trade-off that nets them a Tasmanian devil defender. But after more work on his form in what was admittedly a turbulent offseason with the illness and subsequent passing of his mother, the team’s followers will be looking for signs of consistency.
• We mentioned Theis before as relates to the rotation and working with Baynes and others, but there will also be focus on his return from a torn meniscus. Is he all right physically? And, if he is, does it appear he’s taken the step forward that generally happens with players moving from their first to second seasons in the NBA?
• Even with being such a high draft pick (third overall), Jayson Tatum still had a better than expected rookie season. Now he’s had time to catch his breath and put in offseason work that included time with Kobe Bryant.
His mates all say he’s demonstrably better, and even with the limited looks that come in the preseason, we’re looking forward to seeing it.