I was actually reasonably satisfied with our performance in the first half, we shot poorly but defensively we played well, Middleton hit some miracle threes. You kind of have to pick your poison when it comes to loading the paint against Giannis vs giving up some open looks at the perimeter. But after halftime Giannis started passing the ball out of the paint a lot more and our closeouts to the perimeter were too slow and the barrage of 3s just broke us. Kyrie, Gordon, JT and Terry shot 9-41 that's 21% from the floor. And each miss the Bucks converted on the other end. And the crowd gets really into it. By the end of the quarter they'd lost so much composure that they weren't even in the right spots for passes (e.g. Kyrie to Gordon) and they weren't using plays that worked well in Game 1 (like the Kyrie/Al pick and roll). Just folded mentally. At that point everything that can go wrong tends to go wrong, you get calls against you, Bucks miracle shots go in, etc.
Just gotta learn from the mistakes made in that 3rd and make adjustments. That's really where we lost the game. We said that the Bucks were going to make adjustments, they did. We dared the rest of the team to beat us, well Middleton had 28 and Bledsoe 21, both shot 10-15 from 3. Giannis didn't try to beat us by himself, he passed out to the perimeter a lot more and they killed us.
So both teams have been blown out, any momentum we had from Game 1 has been negated by losing this way. The silver lining is we got blown out on their floor, not ours so we still have home court. Gotta approach Games 3 and 4 like Game 7s, they are absolute must wins. We have to re-think how we're loading, obviously we need to negate Giannis, but we need to do better when it comes to closing out on shooters as well, especially if they're going to keep shooting like this.
Topic: Celtics (1-0) at Bucks (0-1) Round 2 Game 2 4/30/19 (Read 47352 times)