Finding fixes for the C’s
Horford says there are remedies
As grating as his smugness may be on Celtics ears, Draymond Green sounds like he was right.
“Like I said last game, they are who we thought they were,” the Warriors star, the one most responsible for Golden State’s uptick in physicality and defensive intensity, said after his team evened the NBA Finals at 1-1. “So we knew we had to keep our foot on the gas pedal and not let up and we were able to come out with a win.”
The Celtics were what Green thought they were, because the Game 1 trio of Al Horford, Marcus Smart and Derrick White were unable to produce sparkling offense for a second straight game. Horford and Smart each had two points, and despite a game-turning 3-point performance in Game 1, Horford didn’t attempt a three Sunday night.
Chalk that up to Golden State’s improved coverage. But in the course of suffering their worst loss of the 2022 postseason, Horford believes the issues were easily remedied. The Celtics have certainly been resilient. They still haven’t lost consecutive games since a March 30 loss to Miami.
“I feel like we didn’t move it enough on offense at times. I think that for whatever reason, we got caught going downhill, attacking the basket a little more. They did a good job of staying with me, for example,” said Horford. “Obviously I didn’t get an attempt, not even a look. So they did a good job making sure they took me away.
“I just have to find other ways to impact the game, and that’s something that I’ll do Game 3,” he said. “It’s easy to talk now, but I really always like to look at the film. I have to be able to see it again, feel it. Right now, all I can say is that we just needed to move the ball more, get some more movement. But I can look at film and be like, no, we got movement, we just didn’t get the shots. I believe that we just have to play at our own pace, make sure that we’re driving the ball, driving and kicking. When we play like that, that’s when we’re really at our best.”
Turnover hell
They went through it against Miami and Milwaukee over the last two rounds. When the Celtics turn the ball over excessively, they lose. Sunday night’s breakdowns with the ball produced 19 turnovers, parlayed by the War
riors into 33 points.
According to our stat guru, Dick Lipe, the Celtics are 1- 5 in the playoffs when allowing 19 or more points off turnovers, and 12-2 when giving up 18 or less.
“We’ve just got to come out and play basketball for 48 minutes,” said Jaylen Brown. “We do the best we can every single night and it’s gotten us to the Finals. We’re not a perfect team, but we’ll figure it out going forward. We’ve just got to come out and play basketball. We know the Warriors are a thirdquarter team. We talked about it. They still came out and were able to go on a run. We’ve just got to be able to answer, and we didn’t tonight.”
Nigerian woes
Ime Udoka, a former member of the Nigerian national team, and Toronto general manager Masai Ujiri have both spoken out about that nation’s decision to withdraw its basketball teams from competition for the next two years — potentially hamstringing their chance to compete in the 2024 Olympics in Paris.
According to Udoka, this kind of decision is painfully familiar.
“A lot of the same stuff I dealt with as a player, which is disappointing,” he said. “Growth of the sport in general in Nigeria at the town level, whether it’s abroad
or in Nigeria, because it’s vast, you have the players, and not as much as of the aspect of coaching that you need over there. I think it starts from there.
“A lot of things you deal with, I try to look at the good that I had at the time but it was a lot of unorganization, last- minute planning. So some of these things aren’t surprising. I talk to the younger guys who have played in the NBA recently with the Nigerian team and it sounds like a lot of the same things I went through as a player there. Not a lot has changed and it is disappointing. Looks like a little bit of restructuring from the top would help.”