Getting back in rhythm
C’s mounting injuries hurting bench scoring
Not long after Kendrick Perkins sat in with Mike Gorman and Brian Scalabrine for Friday night’s NBC Sports Boston telecast of the Celtics’ loss to Utah, the beloved former Celtic and ESPN influencer went on Twitter with an interesting thought.
The notion of adding a shooter like Jamal Crawford to the Celtics is not a new idea — some have been clamoring for Danny Ainge to sign the free agent veteran all season — but Perkins became the latest to surmise that Crawford’s skills are exactly what the locals need.
Not that it’s going to happen. Ainge seems to be happy with what he has, even if the Celtics’ so-called core five is rarely together.
But an issue once again surfaced on Friday night, this time with Jaylen Brown (hamstring) and Gordon Hayward (bruised knee) sitting out because of their injuries, and Jayson Tatum (illness) and Kemba Walker (knee) both playing with restrictions.
The bench, asked to step up, scored 13 points — nine of those from Brad Wanamaker. Though he only has a small sample size of his entire team actually playing together, Brad Stevens isn’t ready to admit that his bench needs the kind of outside scoring help that a player like Crawford could bring.
Asked about bench scoring, Stevens thought back to Semi Ojeleye’s 22-point performance in Cleveland Wednesday. It was a career high for Ojeleye, who then started Friday to help fill the Brown/Hayward gap.
“It’s so hard to know. We had a guy score 22 the other night, we’ve had a number of our guys play well off the bench,” said Stevens. “And we’ve never really had our full bench intact because we’ve never had our full starters intact. Hard to know.
“When we’re full we’ll see how it looks and see how it goes, but it is what it is,” said the Celtics coach. “Thought we had a lot of good things (Friday night). Just didn’t score well enough. Some of that was decision-making at the rim, where they did a great job, some of it was excellent pressure defense by them, and some of it was missed open shots. Just part of it. I don’t want to make any generalizations about our bench until I see our whole team moving forward.”
That will take time, with Brown listed as out for Sunday’s game against Oklahoma City. Hayward is expected to be active, which should in turn improve the offensive flow.
And the Celtics, befitting their third place positioning in the east, still have one of the top offensive units in the league, though they have slipped to seventh in offensive rating and fifth in net rating.
“We’ll be all right. We’ll be all right. We just got to figure it out,” said Walker, who has missed six of his last eight games with the knee issue. “That’s really it, we just got to figure it out. We’ll be fine. We just need guys to get healthy. That’s our main concern, that’s what’s most important, especially heading into the playoffs. We’ll be fine. We’ll figure it out for sure.”
But in the meantime, Marcus Smart believes that even when shorthanded, the Celtics can do much more to be tougher offensively — especially to help Jayson Tatum find suitable options under the pressure of traps and blitzes. That kind of defensive pressure is now a nightly guarantee for Tatum.
“It’s on us,” said Smart. “I don’t know what’s going on out there. It’s like we let other teams pressure and take us out of the game. When that happens this is the outcome. We have to fix that. We have to be the aggressor. We have to punch first and then when we get punched we’ve got to keep punching.”
And scoring.
“It’s just we have a lot of great players that can make a lot of great plays (and) sometimes we forget shots are not going to fall,” said Smart. “So those shots that we’re so used to making, we’ve gotta cut those down or try to get an easy one, a couple easy ones before we go back to those shots that creating and off the dribble — those tough shots. I know there were a lot of times I got caught with two seconds on the shot clock. We can’t have that. We should be able to score the ball before we get down there late in the shot clock.
“You’ve got Kemba coming back, other guys coming back, and you’ve got guys stepping into roles where they’re trying to acclimate themselves and see at that moment what they need to do. But that’s part of it. We believe in every last one of us in this locker room. So we just have to get it together, plain and simple.”
That said, Smart admits that for as long as Walker is under a minutes restriction, the look of this offense will be different.
“With the talent that we have, Kemba on a minutes restriction, it’s tough to really get him into a groove because he’s coming out as soon as he starts to get his groove,” said Smart. “And he’s cooling off, then has to start back up. That’s tough for any player. Kemba’s a great player, but that’s still tough on you, especially coming out and sitting those many games and now you’re trying to get in that rhythm, your mind’s in it, and now you’re mind’s playing tricks on you because you’re missing shots, now you’re thinking things you shouldn’t think. And it’s tough. But nonetheless, Kemba like I said is a great player. We’re going to figure it out.”