Struggling Celts reflect
Hope to reverse fortunes
Times like this lead to a team-wide exercise in navelgazing. And the Celtics, in the wake of a 1-4 road trip, might need their own maharishi before a solution is found.
Kyrie Irving sees an emotional need for someone more experienced than himself, or Al Horford, or Aron Baynes, maybe even Marcus Morris, to calm down the anxieties of an otherwise young team in early crisis, the most recent lump a 100-94 loss in Portland on Sunday.
“Looking at this locker room, me being in my eighth year and being a veteran as well as Al and Baynes, right now I think it would be nice if we had someone that was a 15-year vet ... that could kind of help us race along the regular season and understand it’s a long marathon rather than just a fullon sprint, when you want to play, when you want to do what you want to do. It’s all about attitude and effort. That’s all it is.”
This wasn’t so much a plea for president of basketball operations Danny Ainge to pick up the phone as it was for emotional maturity and perspective.
Brad Stevens allowed, when asked about possible tinkering with the rotation, that certain tweaks might be on the way.
“Yeah, I mean, I’d like to see us like find some consistency at some point,” the coach said. “We’ve started some games — the Denver game we started off great, Utah game we started off great, Phoenix and (Portland) were disasters.
“So I think that it’s not consistent, whatever our issues are. We’ve talked about the offensive struggles in the first six games, the defensive struggles in the last six. We were a little bit better (defensively against Portland) and ... gave ourselves a chance to win the game. But we can’t keep putting ourselves in this position.”
Judging from the rough process of blending Gordon Hayward into the mix as he attempts to shed a heavy layer of rust, Stevens might need more time than initially thought to reassemble all the pieces.
“That has a lot to do with it, but it’s not just those guys,” Horford said of a new, full lineup with Hayward and Irving, neither part of last spring’s playoff run. “It’s everybody, learning how to play with one another and understand our roles on the team. That’s been our biggest challenge so far this season.
“We’ve been addressing it. There’s no excuse. We need to play better. I need to play better. Get back to the way we can play and dominate. It’s tough, it hurts, but we can’t hang our heads and be ready for the next game.”
One player on the other side, quite familiar with Stevens and the way he wants his team to play, believes the Celtics roster is a long-term chemistry experiment.
“I think obviously when everything is overloaded, it’s definitely tougher than what it was, especially a unique situation of guys breaking out and then guys coming back,” Portland’s Evan Turner said. “Certain things have to happen with the talent. Terry Rozier turns into Scary Terry, but then you’ve got Kyrie Irving. That’s an exception to the rule.
“You got Jayson Tatum, Jaylen Brown, I thought they did an amazing job (last season). You have Gordon Hayward coming back, and with that you really have to work him in and really have to go toward what you paid him to do. It’s going to be a lot of sacrifices, but I think when it comes down to it, they really want to get where they want to go, and (when) Brad preaches to them, everybody will sacrifice for the greater good. Especially right now how crazy Boston is without a title.”
The Celtics also have been told they should be NBA finalists this year.
“We’re not as good as we think we are. I said it at the beginning of the season,” Irving said.
Tatum agrees that, just maybe, the Celtics have spent too much time listening to the outside hype.
“I mean, it might just be human nature. A lot of guys were hyping us up early, before the season started, but we have a lot of talented guys on this team,” he said. “We just have to figure it out.”