Walker a full-go as playoffs tip off
Face off with 76ers in first round
Kemba Walker was finally freed from his minutes restriction Monday night in Game 1 against Philadelphia
CELTICS NOTEBOOK
— freed to play the game his way.
The Celtics point guard admittedly felt “rushed” during the seeding round as the coaching staff slowly increased his minutes load — designed to bring the strength back to his balky left knee. His last minutes ceiling was 32, and now Walker can presumably play to his normal capacity without a single glance at the sidelines.
Brad Stevens noticed a few of those anxious moments, specifically when it was time for Walker to sub out.
“I only saw that idea of him rushing a couple of times, when he knew he was coming out,” said the Celtics coach. “But other than that I didn’t see it. He never let on.”
Nor does Stevens have any concerns about Walker returning to his normal workload now.
“Unfortunately I’ve seen him play his normal game as an opponent, and he’s a bear to guard, and I’ve seen his normal game when he’s played here,” said Stevens. “I really didn’t need any more information on his normal game.
“We needed his knee to get stronger, and that is difficult — I give Kemba, our training staff and everyone involved a ton of credit for the communication they had going into all those games,” he said. “Everything was mapped out for a three-week timeframe — actually a five-week timeframe. For them to be able to stick with that, for Kemba to be able to understand the big picture and stick with that, I think says a lot about him and a lot about our training staff and the great job they do.”
BS report
Ben Simmons, out for the playoffs following knee surgery, is the most discussed player no longer in the Orlando bubble.
But Stevens continues to stress how good the Philadelphia offense has been without their dynamic transition point guard.
“First of all, they are the best offense in the league without him. That’s over 1.2 points per possession by all the notes that I have,” said the Celtics coach. “The shooting around (Joel) Embiid is amazing. They have a bunch of 40% 3-point shooters, they have guys that can put it on the floor and have guys that can play in pick-and-roll.
“That doesn’t take away at all from how good Simmons is,” he said. “Simmons is excellent but sometimes when you have a guy who has the ball a lot and is such a focal point of what they do, that gives everyone else an even bigger freedom when those guys aren’t available. We’ve seen that here in the past. and I think that ultimately, it is quite a challenge for us without him. Quite a challenge when he does play obviously, he’s a heck of a player, but this team can hurt you in a lot of different ways. They’re super talented and very big and physical.”
Hoodie mellow
Bill Belichick addressed the Celtics on Friday, an off-day, and though Stevens didn’t want to go into too much detail about what the Patriots coach shared, preparation was apparently a major talking point.
“I won’t go too far into it because I want to respect him and respect what he had to say to us, but he’s obviously one of the best coaches in any sport of all time, and probably renowned as the best preparer of all time, and that’s something that we thought was really important as we head into this time of the year,” said Stevens. “We’re trying our best to keep this fresh, and we also have a lot of time on our hands on these off-days, so it was so nice of Bill to take some time out of his preseason schedule and speak to our team.”