Celtics show requisite resolve – and second half offense – to fell Bucks

There will be no parade to commemorate this victory – no champagne after the buzzer and no reason to be measured for jewelry.

Their 116-105 come-from-far-behind victory notwithstanding, the Celtics will still be looking up at Milwaukee in every set of power rankings on this last morning of October. No one who picked the Bucks to finish comfortably ahead of the Bostonians is having prognosticator’s remorse.

What the Celtics proved Wednesday night is more about what they said to themselves, and it is simply that they have the grit to compete. The fact that was an open question with an unpleasant reply for much of the evening is an important element to this equation, and it sets a bar of expectation within the club.

Giannis Antetokounmpo got his 22 points and 14 rebounds, and the Bucks spent the first half toying with the all too accommodating hosts.

But finally the Celtics’ rediscovered sense of purpose and the momentum it created overtook the better Bucks like the king tides washing over Long Wharf this week.

We said before the season began that the Celts should be more than fine in the regular season because they have the depth and type of player to be this way consistently. And with the holes in their rotation, exacerbated by the absences of Jaylen Brown (illness) and Enes Kanter (knee) last night, this is the kind of stuff it will take to beat most anyone.

As if dealing with Antetokounmpo wasn’t going to be frightening enough under even the best circumstances, the night before Halloween was made even scarier without Brown to offer initial resistance and Kanter to step into the way after Giannis broke containment.

“He was obviously going to get a lot of the assignment on him,” said Brad Stevens of Brown before the game. “So we’ll just have to have other people do that. We’re going to have to guard him by committee. We’ll have to do a lot of different things probably.”

For the first half Celtics, making shots would have constituted something different.

Presumably comfortable with the home surroundings, they nonetheless drew nothing but iron 12 of their 18 first quarter shots on the way to an anemic 19 points. Being unguarded didn’t seem to help either, as the C’s missed half their eight free throws.

They came into the game third-worst in the NBA from both the floor and the line and offered no rebuttal.

It didn’t take the Bucks long to discover the easy way to do things. A bit less than a minute in, Antetokounmpo went for a drive down Causeway Street, but he forced the action and was a little out of control as he giant-stepped into the paint. Marcus Smart, his primary defender, backed up to avoid bailing him out with a foul and earned a jump ball.

But soon Milwaukee cracked the combination. Because the Celtics were so prepared to scramble in help mode on defense, the visitors learned that open shots were readily available when they moved the ball. So when Giannis ran off a pick with Eric Bledsoe and found 6-foot-nothing Kemba Walker on his 6-11 self, the Celts rushed to get Daniel Theis to take their point guard’s place. Bledsoe didn’t always get the ball to Antetokounmpo, but the Bucks took advantage of the Shamrock fire drill and hit 9-of-22 mostly lonely 3-pointers on the way to leads as large as 19 in the first half.

The Celts, meanwhile, got a combined 7-for-26 (26.9 percent) on field goals from Walker, Jayson Tatum and Gordon Hayward and hit 34.1 percent overall in the half.

It may be fair to assume that some of what the Celtics did in their dressing room at halftime involved recalibrating the GPS on their collective shot.

Down 58-42 on national television, they combined aggression with some appropriate casting of caution to the wind.

It was as if they’d decided that stinking it up again wouldn’t be half as bad as long as they did it while playing hard. That feeling was clearly helped along by the fact they were able to see some of their shots fall through the strings, and while the Bucks kept up for a while, the Celtics began harrying them into rushed shots and pressed into the lead with a preponderance of offense.

The C’s scored just four points fewer in the third quarter than they did in the first half, hitting 54.2 percent from the field. Their 6-for-10 on treys in the frame matched their anemic effort from the free throw line in the opening 24 minutes.

But there will be ample numbers and analytics to explain the comeback to an early season signature win. But more important to the larger Celtic picture were the intangibles on display.

That’s still not enough to get anyone thinking about games in June, but it is, at the very least, a high quality sneaker in the right direction.

 

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/32X8ahX