Celtics shut down Toronto with Game 5 win for 3-2 lead

Brad Stevens isn’t simply stroking his players — fluffing up those egos — when he tells them they’re special.

But the Celtics coach also felt a need for the Celtics to prove it Monday night.

“One of the things we’ve talked a lot about is special groups — and if you want to be special it’s only reserved for a few, right? Special groups have a great resiliency about them,” he said before the Celtics blew apart Game 5 with a 111-89 win over Toronto for a 3-2 second round series lead.

After admitting a lack of effort after the Raptors tied the series in Game 4, the Celtics made themselves felt early on the defensive end, limiting Toronto to an 11-point first quarter and a 35-point first half — both lows for any team in the playoff field. Toronto’s 27-point halftime deficit was the second-worst in franchise playoff history.

Stevens basically snorted at the notion three days ago that offense was his problem in Game 4.

“It starts on defense,” he said, and sure enough, with Marcus Smart and an electrified Jaylen Brown turning in some great early defensive possessions, the Celtics carved out an early edge, led by a 62-35 score at halftime and protected their billowing lead the rest of the way.

Though they lost yet another third quarter — it’s been nine straight since the playoffs began — Stevens was able to ward off an early slide in the quarter with a timeout that reset his team’s edge.

Fred VanVleet had just cruised in for a pair of drives when, with just over eight minutes left in the third, the Celtics coach pulled his team off the floor. They returned with greater energy, returned to disrupting the Raptors, and averted the kind of third quarter collapse that plagued them in Game 4.

“One of the things we’ve talked about is trying to stay in the moment — go at each possession as well as we can,” he said. “Obviously we wanted to start better than we did. But even when I called the timeout we were only minus-2 or 3. When you have a big lead like that, as long as it’s not minus-10 or minus-8, you can manage it a little bit. It’s more a thought that we have to play the possession better — we have to play every possession better.”

Brown, coming off a 2-for-11 Game 4 performance from downtown, started mixing it up at both ends, finished the half with 16 points on 6-for-11 shooting, and finally left the floor with 27 points, three 3-pointers, six rebounds and three steals.

“Jaylen has a big time character,” said Stevens. “He’s got competitive character, he works, he’s focused, he wants to do well, and it was good to see him knock in that first one. But I don’t think it would have mattered if he missed a couple early. He was going to be aggressive, and that was good for our team.”

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/3mag0yS