Brad Stevens says Celtics need to ‘play like a Boston Celtics team should’ to get back on track
"For whatever reason, we don't look like we're bringing out the best in each other."
Boston Celtics coach Brad Stevens offered up an impassioned post-game press conference on Friday, imploring his team to play together and “be more engaged” with each other after the Celtics dropped another disappointing game — this one to the Sacramento Kings.
On Sunday, before the Celtics took on the Orlando Magic, Stevens repeated his message and called for his team to be more resilient and adaptable.
“We have to be able to move on to the next play better,” Stevens said. “The one thing you can’t do in basketball is expect anybody to be perfect. I think that we hold ourselves individually to a high standard, and sometimes we hold each other to a high standard where we don’t allow for the freedom to make mistakes, and I think that’s really important. I think that’s a big part of playing together, a big part of being a team, and we just haven’t been as good at that as we need to be to withstand this stuff. To withstand the challenges that have been in front of us, both before the break and certainly after.
“The last two games have not been good, with necessarily, there were moments, but we have to look better together, and I think a big part of that is bringing out the best in one another and quite frankly, we’ve got to play like a Boston Celtics team should.”
Stevens has had experience coaching teams that look like the Celtics are supposed to look. The 2016-17 team was hard-nosed and tough. The 2017-18 team kept soldiering through injuries and marched directly to the Eastern Conference finals.
Since, things have been more difficult. The 2018-19 team’s failures altered the Celtics’ trajectory permanently, and while the 2019-20 team made it back to the Eastern Conference finals, they didn’t look particularly strong in the postseason.
This year’s team scuffled out of the gate and hasn’t been able to put the pieces together even as they get healthy. Stevens was asked what it would look like if the team started playing better.
“I think our guys like playing,” Stevens said. “They like the feeling of playing great together. There’s nobody that doesn’t like that, and there’s nobody in here that I feel like is not trying to do that.
I just think that, for whatever reason, we don’t look like we’re bringing out the best in each other. And that’s what we have to do. The teams we’re playing are good, they’re talented, they have a lot of answers. They’ve got good players. This Orlando team that we’re playing today is coming off one of the best wins their season, if not the best win of their season, and it’s not a coincidence because they’ve got a lot of their best players back in the lineup. And so to beat teams like that, you can’t be to yourself. You have to be engaged in the team, and I think again, we have the right people to do that. And I believe that we will do that. But until you do it consistently, then it’s hard to say that you’re that. And I think that that’s our next step — by the end of these 30 games, we are a team that is really hard to be on both ends of the court, because we play with great togetherness.”
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