Celtics carry sense of desperation into Game 5

If ever the Celtics were going to play with desperation, Friday night was seemingly going to be it.

Trailing Miami, 3-1, in Game 5 of the Eastern Conference finals, the Celtics took the floor knowing it could be their last until Christmas, or whenever the NBA decides that the next season will begin.

The Celtics, though, have only occasionally played with that kind of urgency in the Orlando bubble.

“I think the idea is what you want to be, right? You want to play like every possession is the last possession of the game,” said Brad Stevens. “You want to play with great focus on hitting singles with those possessions, and at the same time missing a shot in the early part of the game isn’t going to make or break the game.

“So you also have to play confidently. You also have to play assertively and aggressive. You can’t play timid, so I think that there’s a fine line,” said the Celtics coach. “Our thing this whole, entire experience has been compete with great intentions and do your best to stay in the moment and play as well as we can. We’ve had really good moments playing all the way up to this point, including in this series. We haven’t had enough of them when it’s mattered most, and I think that that’s where we have to be even more locked in and taking advantage of every possession.”

Hayward crucial

Gordon Hayward’s return to the lineup was never going to be more pivotal than Friday night, with his multiple skills crucial to an offense that sputtered down the stretch of Game 4, especially when it came to taking care of the ball.

But when asked about whether he had to increase Hayward’s role, Stevens fell back on his mantra of making the right play.

“I think that there is a fine line there,” said Stevens. “We need to be able to play to each person’s strengths. The zone does make it so that the action has to generate the next right play and it’s oftentimes the person who generates that action that doesn’t necessarily get the shot or even the second guy that doesn’t get the shot. So we need to make sure that we’re just making the next right play. We’re not really worried about individual usage, we’re worried about getting great shots for our team (Friday). We did a lot better in the third quarter the other day and except for the turnovers we had some good looks in the fourth quarter, so looking forward to building off that.

“I think one of the things, first of all, (Hayward) didn’t play in a game for five weeks and now he’s on game two, or game three, so I think that’s a little bit of a unique situation where we already have some high-usage players that have played well and in a lot of ways have carried us offensively.”

Tatum time

The Celtics had to hope that the Jayson Tatum who awoke with a 28-point second half in Game 4 — as opposed to the one who went scoreless in the first — was the player who stepped back onto the floor in Friday night’s first quarter.

“So some guys I’d say yes,” Stevens said when asked if individual players can carry momentum from one game to the next. “Some guys I’d say I don’t know, and some guys are — like Tatum’s been so good that how he played (Wednesday) doesn’t really affect how he’s going to play (Friday) because he usually plays well. So I think that that’s just probably person to person. I don’t think there’s any question that you can go through periods of great confidence. At that point in time when you’re playing against someone going through that, you’ve got to do your best to break your rhythm. But at the other end of things, I think that each player is a little different.

“He was just really aggressive in the second half. I thought obviously a lot of guys, when they have a first half where they struggle, would struggle the whole game. But really good players in this league, all they need to do is see the ball go in once, and once he saw that at the start of the third quarter, it took off from there.”

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/3mSQqi9