Road trip wraps regular season
Top four seeds in the Eastern Conference still up for grabs
The Celtics leave Tuesday on a three-city, season-ending road trip against three playoff teams — the first two, back-to-back in Chicago and Milwaukee, qualifying as important scouting stops.
CELTICS NOTEBOOK
The Celtics are currently in second place, two games behind conference-leading Miami, and a half-game ahead of the Bucks and 76ers. Thursday’s game against the Bucks could well decide who gets the second seed. Wednesday’s game against the fifth place Bulls looms as a potential first round matchup if the Celtics drop in the standings — a realistic possibility, considering that they finish the regular season on Sunday in Memphis against one of the hottest teams in the NBA.
But with so many possibilities, Ime Udoka simply wants his team to play well, with three road games against playoff teams the perfect training run.
“That’s why I keep saying, playing our best basketball and playing well,” the Celtics coach said after Monday’s practice. “And that kind of leads into, or lends into winning. and the results kind of go from there.
“So we’ll see how Chicago goes and play from there,” he said. “It’s too much to try to determine based on what other teams are trying to do or what they will do, or where the seedings land, so it’s playing our best and from there we’ll determine after Chicago what we do in Milwaukee and Memphis. Knowing Memphis is set and they could be resting guys, that could play into what we ended up doing. But we’ll see down the line.”
Determining anything else at this point is simply too complex, with the top four teams in the Eastern Conference separated by 2K games.
“Usually nothing like this, where one to four is so tightly contested,” said Udoka. “And then I guess five and six more so now. Obviously, the play-in plays into it as well for preparation purposes — could be playing four different teams. But I had one in San Antonio a few years ago, where we lost to New Orleans last day, New Orleans got into the playoffs, we would have been second if we won and fell all the way to seventh. But even with that, you knew who your opponent was going to be based on win and loss. This is, obviously, totally different because of the four or six teams in the mix.”
To rest or not to rest
As Udoka mentioned, the Celtics may have an opportunity to rest their main rotational players by the time they reach Memphis if the game has no bearing on seeding. At the same time, he’s trying to raise the minutes load for Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown to roughly 40 per game once the playoffs begin.
“The rest part would come into play if you were set, if you knew where you were at, and Memphis is probably locked in at No. 2, and so they can kind of map out their last few games and we’re not in that situation because of it,” he said. “But we do have a back-to-back with days off in between and two days before the back-to-back so we can kind of figure that out. Chicago is the first step and we’ll see about Milwaukee. But, overall, it’s just because of the jumbled standings that makes it tougher, preparation-wise. Other than that, if our seeding was set, we could kind of map out our last week going into the season or going into playoffs.”
Nesmith tries to crack the rotation
Though he scored 11 points on 4-for-5 shooting in only eight minutes during Sunday’s blowout of Washington, Aaron Nesmith didn’t get on the floor until garbage time. The secondyear shooter is trying for something better — a role in the playoff rotation.
“Get shots up before or after practice, continue working and doing what I can to stay ready,” he said. “And that way whenever my name is called, I just go out and show how much work I put in and do what I can to help win games.”
Sunday’s performance was a help.
“It’s always good to see your shot go down. Whenever a shot goes in, it’s a good feeling. It’s always good to get back to that,” he said. “Pretty much just everybody in general (is a help).
“Everybody has their own experiences. Like Jaylen (Brown), like Payton (Pritchard) said, didn’t play a lot his first two years, as much as he wanted to. So everybody has their own experience, whether it’s on this team or a different team, about how they went through little pockets of not playing and then how they handle it.”