Celtics draw strength from players meeting
Smart: ‘We were focusing on what we want this season to be’
You know what they say about player meetings. When a troubled season gets to that point, it’s often over.
So that’s what the Celtics players did following Friday’s dispiriting loss to Sacramento. With the possibility of being funneled through the play-in tournament instead of locking down a top-six seed, they pulled up their chairs in the locker room and zeroed in.
CELTICS NOTEBOOK
“It was just us. We were focusing on what we want this season to be for us, what we want to leave behind this season,” Marcus Smart said after Sunday’s 112-96 win over Orlando. “We (don’t) want to be a team that they talk about, ‘they gave up’ or ‘just this, this or that’ about this season.
“We have enough time to turn it around and that’s all on us. We sat down and we understand we haven’t been playing to the criteria that we expected and others expect us to. We are a young team and we are learning. The big thing and the biggest thing about growth is understanding and accepting the faults that you are wrong for, yourself, individually, and as a team. The talks that we had, we did that. We just tried to sit down and tried to figure it out and listen to one another to help, not ourselves but the team individually and everybody. Try to put everybody in the right position to succeed and we came out and it showed tonight and that’s what we have to continue to keep going.”
Better luck next time
Little did Jaylen Brown realize on his way to a career-high 10 3-pointers that he had fallen one make shy of Smart’s single-game franchise record.
“He didn’t tell me,” said Brown. “If he would have told me that, I would have shot two or three more. I had lost count at a certain point. I wish somebody did tell me that. I would have fired up at least five or six more to make sure I beat Marcus.”
Hard at work
Sunday’s game kicked off a stretch of five games in seven days, the rest of it a fourgame road trip that begins tonight in Memphis.
The heavy minutes being logged by Jayson Tatum and Brown considered, there may be some rest considerations included along the way.
“It’s been a concern all year,” coach Brad Stevens said of the minutes grind. “We’ve had conversations with them and try to make sure we are listening to them, managing that appropriately. And if it does present itself that one of those guys would need a break because of the density of the schedule, then we would certainly take that. That has not presented itself as of yet, but yeah, I said that in January and February.
“That was a huge thing with our team, and you could see it show itself there in a lot of stretches but now that we have a few more bodies available and everything else we hope that isn’t the case,” Stevens said. “But we’ll still be managing minutes on the second nights of back to backs and obviously Kemba (Walker) won’t be playing (Monday) night, so there’s a lot to manage there.”