Celtics set sights on Milwaukee
With homecourt advantage nullified, team aims to peak at right time
Practice two days ago was long and hard, and Monday in Orlando the rust came out.
But in terms of scheduling, the bubble gods gave the Celtics something meaty to aim for — a July 31 game against Milwaukee to kick off the seeding schedule.
The best team in the east is a welcome opening opponent.
“Me personally, you’re always preparing to play the next game and to win the next game and that’s it. Then you fall where you fall and you play,” said coach Brad Stevens. “In the playoffs, obviously the home court advantage is something that usually would take on greater importance because of the impact of crowds.
“But I still think the goal is to be peaking, the goal is to be playing well, the goal is to be playing good basketball and I don’t think you can just turn that on,” said the Celtics coach. “At least in my experience, we haven’t been able to just turn that on all the sudden. We have to be building towards that. So our focus will be on the first seeding game against Milwaukee. We’ve got to prepare really well and play as well as we can.
“I like playing Milwaukee first because they challenge you in so many different ways. When you think about their defense being as elite as it is and their offense being as fast and spread out as it is, we’re going to find out a lot about ourselves on July 31.”
And until then, there will be rust and sloppiness.
“That’s going to be the challenge for everybody, for all teams,” said Gordon Hayward. “I think the team can embrace this, work through it, and have fun playing basketball with each other and finding a way to find that rhythm early is going to be the most successful one.
“I think for us that starts defensively, I think our mindset is going to be all about our defense,” he said. “I think that’s where we’re going to be very successful, we’re very versatile, so as we’re trying to work on that rhythm, the timing of our offense, trying to get all that back down, the one thing that we can still be good at is our defense. A lot of that is effort. A lot of that is anticipation. Some of it is definitely system-based, so we’re working on that as well; finding the timing and rhythm on defense as well. But I think most of that is effort and communication, so I think we’re going to try to focus on that and then use the weeks of practice and exhibition game to try to find our groove offensively.”
There’s also the issue of adding things to the offense — a late-season process for all NBA coaches.
“Every team is balancing that. The fundamentals you have to do anyway, but as far as running your system we’ve been able to pick up right where we left off with our calls and knowing what to run,” said Stevens. “We thought we had a lot going for us at both ends of the court. Statistically that would be backed up, but what it also does is give us a chance to review when you get back to playing. But you do that anyways. We didn’t have in everything we were going to have in on March 11, because you want to save some things for April. It’s probably not too dissimilar, but we’ve had more time to review and really analyze our team. The one thing we still haven’t had a chance to do too much is analyze our team in full. Kemba (Walker) can rejoin us in practice Wednesday, and then we can get a better look at ourselves.”