C’S ICE COLD AS HEAT TURNS UP
Rivers, players frustrated with their six-game slide
Doc Rivers has talked to a lot of coaching peers — in college as well as the NBA — during the Celtics’ current six-game losing streak, and they all try to bolster the spirits of a frustrated man.
Most point to the Celtics’ pattern of second-half rebirth in recent seasons. Your team will do it again, they say.
But the team that came within a game of beating Miami and reaching the NBA Finals last spring is not the one destroying Rivers’ brain cells now.
Miami makes its first Garden visit of the year today, and the Heat can make an argument that they are even better. But the Celtics, 20-23 and dropping, are worse. They’ve been here before, of course. Prior to last year’s renaissance, they were two games under .500 at the All-Star break.
But when Rivers hears this kind of reasoning — this kind of stroking — he wants to clamp his hands over his ears.
The Celtics, with their most disillusioning loss yet in a six-game slump, blew a 27-point second-quarter lead and lost in double overtime in Atlanta Friday night. The starters are on the hook for this latest disgrace. Paul Pierce alone was a minus-30. Pierce and Rajon Rondo combined for 11 turnovers.
So don’t talk to Rivers about a second-half salvation when not even his elite players are dependable.
“I keep hearing that. I hear it every time I talk to a coach — you guys always do that,” said Rivers. “Not this group. The groups in the past, yeah, we had to do that. We had to not play Shaq (O’Neal) many minutes, or we had to rest Rasheed (Wallace), Kevin (Garnett), Ray (Allen) and Paul. But we have nine new guys here. We’ve never done this. They may be thinking that, but if they do it’s an error.
“They (all) say the same thing. I would love one of them to tell me something different. That would be refreshing. One of the guys I talk to the most, who is in college, the first thing he said was you shouldn’t have to coach hard, but I am, and I do. I have to do different things — I clearly don’t know what they are.”
He’ll try anything
Rivers has already thrown everything at this team, including fury. He’s called them soft. He’s threatened lineup changes. Following last Sunday’s loss in Detroit, he threatened to ship out the unnamed offending parties.
Danny Ainge had to talk the entire organization back off the ledge after that one. The Celtics president of basketball operations has a much better chance of making a significant deal before the Feb. 21 trading deadline if the rest of the league doesn’t know this team is so desperate for a change.
Then again, how can they not know?
But Rivers’ friend is right. He shouldn’t have to coach so hard. Listen to his latest idea.
“It’s me. I have to figure out the buttons with each individual,” said Rivers. “I’ve been trying to coach a group, and maybe I have to coach each individual. But I’m just gonna keep searching. I keep telling my coaches that we have the right group, but we have to act right, all the time.”
Perhaps it’s the price of attempting to integrate nine new players at the start of the season, but the problems aren’t uniform. As evidenced by the Atlanta loss, the starters — that once trusty core — are just as capable of ruining the product as the new guys.
“It’s why we are who we are,” Rivers said with a sigh. “I still see it in the locker room, I see our talent. We play a quarter and a half of almost perfect basketball, and then we can’t leave good enough alone. Then we start playing different. . . . I (once) lost 18 games in a row. We’ve gone through some tough stretches and gotten out of it. But some of our tough stretches since we’ve had this group have been self-inflicted. (That was) the stretch where I said I’m going to sit guys and practice for two hours. But this stretch isn’t that.
“I keep saying it. I have to keep pushing them.”
And then, almost as a way of signing off, he said, “You keep preaching the word, and that’s all we can do.”
All on same channel
For the first time in the Kevin Garnett era, Rivers has a right to wonder whether he’s being heard.
But if he isn’t, the likely reason is that his veterans are too busy browbeating themselves. Jason Terry still doesn’t feel comfortable with his shots. Pierce is in one of the worst shooting slumps of his career.
Garnett, too, is admittedly puzzled. His postgame media sessions are now a little haunted.
“This is the season,” he said. “There’s going to be a lot of ups and downs, but we can’t come out making the same mistakes, man. It gets old.”
And it’s getting older. That old security blanket — the one that says they’re pacing for the playoffs — has lost its warmth. That thinking is now dangerous. “We can’t rely on that. That’s the past, and this is a whole different group of guys,” said Garnett, channeling Rivers. “Guys in the past are the past. If we sit around waiting on that, then that’s a joke. It’s about now, not tomorrow, and everyone has to look at themselves and see what they can do to help this team.”
Courtney Lee, asked the same question, channeled Garnett.
“You definitely can’t rely on that,” said the Celtics guard. “Put it like this — if we took care of the first half of the season, then we could play out the second half of the season and be one of the top two seeds. But we can’t rely on that. We have to change this right now. We have a few weeks before All-Star break and then that second half starts, so we have to get going right now.”
Or perhaps they’re no longer good enough to pull out of a tailspin. Pierce, asked if the Celtics have receded from last spring, took a long pause.
“I don’t know. We made our adjustment last year,” he said. “There’s a lot of similarities to last year going into All-Star break, where we aren’t playing well. We had a sub-.500 record and turned it around, so hopefully this team can show some resolve.”
No turmoil here
There it is — the reflex to think that what worked in the past will bail the Celtics out again. Maybe that’s a necessary part of their self-belief.
“It has to come from within,” said Pierce. “You can’t assume it will happen, but we’re still a confident club. There’s no pointing fingers in this locker room. A lot of teams start to go through losing streaks and they start falling apart and point fingers. That’s something you don’t see here.
“It’s the leadership in this room — myself, Rondo and Kevin. It’s not a young team that plays for stats,” he said. “You have a lot of veterans here. They understand it’s a long season, and you just have to stay with it. We feel like it’s something that will definitely turn around.”
Miami returns today for the first time since Game 6 of the 2012 Eastern Conference finals, when the combination of a great LeBron James performance and an inability by the Celtics to close sent the series back to Miami. The Heat went on to win the title, and the Celtics went into the summer.
They came close last year. They’re a lot further away now.