Rivers plans to rest, sit starters
Celtics coach Doc Rivers revealed that he is indeed planning to rest his starters down the stretch of the regular season, a departure at least from his public comments of a week ago.
Detroit recently deactivated three of its starters to prepare them for the playoffs. Rivers was asked if he would take that path, or simply reduce minutes for certain players once his team clinched homecourt advantage in the playoffs.
“A little bit of both,” said Rivers. “I think eventually, when we get to that point…we have a quirky schedule coming up, and we would love to be able to take advantage of it. I’ll put it that way. It’s something we looked at a month ago, and we were hoping it would have happened already, but it hasn’t.
“Once we get it down to where home court is pretty much done, then we can do some different things. It’s not like we don’t have a plan for that, but we’ve got to get to the part where we can use the plan.”
Despite public comments last week where Rivers said he did not want to rest his starters and have them lose their rhythm, the coach said this has been in the plans all along.
“I haven’t changed at all,” said Rivers. “You don’t talk about rest publicly, because you have players who actually read the paper more than the coaches. You know what I’m saying? So you just kind of let it stay out there. No one knows what wer’re going to do except for our staff.”
Rivers said his team is preparing for Atlanta and Indiana as Boston’s two possible first-round opponents.
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