Imagine the Celtics' talent with a coach who demanded disciplined play and who was not afraid of his players.
Lol where's your source he's scared of his players?
Thin air lol?
My source is that Stevens' players - every season - take bad shots, do not run a disciplined offense and jack 3's with impunity.
What games are you watching or do you have a basic lack of basketball knowledge ?
I thought the Celtics took many more good (open) shots than Brooklyn did. Some of KD/Kyrie's 3s today were ridiculous, as were a lot of Levert's points. Kyrie actually had his career high for made 3's today. On the other hand, the Celtics missed a ton of short floaters/layups and a few open threes. We also had 9 wide-open points (two Tatum layups, a Pritchard 3 and a Pritchard 2) directly taken away by either borderline "illegal screen" calls or Pritchard stepping half an inch out of bounds.
I think the Nets are the more talented team, but imo the margin of victory today was due to more bad luck than awful play. Brooklyn won't shoot above 50% from 3 every game, and the Celtics won'd shoot 38.8% from the field (40.8% from 2) most nights, either.
For what it's worth, I actually thought Brad's game plan today was really solid. On offense, we consistently got Tatum and Brown the ball with mismatches in favorable spots (near the nail or with a half-step at the arc). Brown did a better job than Tatum of taking advantage, but neither was excellent (Brown missed a lot of bunnies, and Tatum seemed to dribble into help rather than away from it at points). They also had Brooklyn scrambling around and often out of position, as evidenced by the C's 20 offensive rebounds. (The Celtics outrebounded Brooklyn by 9 on a night where they shot over 12% worse from the field.) On defense, the team struggled with Jordan's vertical spacing, but a lot of the Nets' scores came later in the shot clock with favorable defensive matchups (ie Durant attacking Tatum, Kyrie scoring over Smart or Brown, Levert shooting over Brown). Rarely tonight did I see Durant take advantage of a poor/short defender or Kyrie isolate and expose a big.
The straightaway pull-up 3's in a defender's eye by KD and Kyrie (and the mid-rangers by Dinwiddie and Levert) are what make the Nets so difficult to guard, but you can't really control whether those go in or not. What you can do is force teams to make those shots again and again on appropriate length and quickness over the course of a 48-minute game. Unfortunately for the Celtics, the Nets did that pretty consistently tonight.
Topic: Nets (1-0) at Celtics (1-0) Game #2 12/25/20 (Read 37213 times)