Brown looks beyond Biden’s election
Jaylen Brown’s most common response to the NBA’s social justice initiatives is that there’s much more to be done.
The Celtics forward feels the same way about our new president.
“My dilemma was never with any presidency or selections of different faces. It’s more about the system, I think that needs to be changed,” said Brown. “I definitely think a lot of people feel at ease knowing that there’s a different president that’s going to be representing our country going forward. I know there was a lot of stress attached to our former president, potentially.
“But I definitely want to keep the same energy up in terms of having awareness and pushing for change,” he said. “Obviously, I’ve had glimmers of hope in the past and they haven’t necessarily (led to) direct change. So I don’t want the situation to be any different, I want people to keep the same energy, and just because
we have a new president doesn’t mean the system doesn’t need to be changed and people need to be pacified or anything like that. We gotta keep the same energy up, people still gotta care, people still to need to make phone calls, etcetera. I’m looking forward to continuing to fight for change.”
As such, Brown is reserving judgement.
“Like everybody, we all want to be opportunistic, and definitely feel like change is going to come,” he said. “But I think we’ve seen this before. I think we’ve had, in the past, previous presidents or previous people in place who gave those same glimmers of hope. And people were still dying that should not have died. The system — people were still being incarcerated at a high rate.
“There’s still systemic oppression that exists so I think we’ve seen these situations before so I don’t want to be pessimistic but I think now having a new face, people are taking their foot off the gas and thinking that everything is OK now and I would like to challenge that. I think that we still have a lot of work to do, regardless if Biden is in office or not.”
Coach taking his time with Timelord
Though Robert Williams was available during Wednesday night’s loss to Philadelphia, he didn’t play. Brad Stevens said he’s being cautious, considering that the young center was not only confined to quarantine, but tested positive for COVID-19.
“It’s gonna be our thing this year. That’s, I think, going to be the most difficult,” said the Celtics coach. “He wasn’t cleared to play very many minutes. So it was more like an eight-to-10 minute limit, based on being out for a couple of weeks and those types of things.
“The way that the game was going, the way that (Daniel) Theis was playing off the bench, it made sense to roll with Theis,” said Stevens. “But you know, it’s one of the reasons why, and we’ve talked about this ad nauseum, the double big lineup was not great, we all knew that. But it was also a way that Robert could maximize his opportunities early while we had Kemba (Walker) out. So we’ve got to figure out a way to maximize all of those guys, get Tristan (Thompson) up to speed and, you know, again, I think he’s playing from behind with missing training camp. Although I think he’s getting more and more com
fortable every day. But Theis and Robert are good players and so we need to make sure that we’re maximizing that potential.”
Tatum still out
Jayson Tatum continues to work out in Boston, though not with a clear return date. As the second Celtic to emerge from a 14-day quarantine, caution is the keyword, regardless of Tatum’s value.
“Obviously, the cardiac screening has to be done before you can enter the gym and before you can do anything,” said Stevens. “And obviously as a coach, that’s all I can really think about. I would never want to put somebody out there who hasn’t gone through that.
“And then the part that the minutes restrictions is decided by, once they’re cleared, with the cardiac stuff, is just how many minutes were they playing prior to,” he said. “What was their activity level in the 14 days, which is usually completely none, and then you’re just trying to balance getting ramped up in a game scenario with the idea of preventing muscular injury. It’s more about that than it is anything else, because they haven’t done anything. You know, hamstrings and, you know, obviously, we want to be very, very careful as guys come back into play.”