On the latest episode this week of his podcast ?Mind the Game? with Steve Nash, the Los Angeles Lakers star James spoke out about the Boston Celtics in the wake of their elimination from the playoffs. James said during his remarks that he believes the Celtics can get bored and complacent at times on the court. ?You think they get bored sometimes?? said James. ?Like, they?ve been doing this s?t so long. It seems like they get bored sometimes with the ? I don?t want to say the process ? because they are who they are. ?When you look at [Jayson] Tatum and [Jaylen] Brown, this is years and years and years and years,? James added. ?They?ve punched their 10,000 hours, but sometimes it seems like they get a little bored because of how great they are, not only as those two as individuals, but them as a team. And sometimes, it looks like they get bored.? 2 mins ago ? via Larry Brown Sports
He's right. And we've seen it under Brad, Ime, & now Joe. If there is a knock I have on the Jays, it's this. People can complain about the coaching all they want but, at the end of the day, a lot of it comes down to the players. This boredom, for lack of a better term, leads to laziness and some bad habits which we've seen out there. Lack of ball movement, isolation, standing around the 3 point line, settling for jumpers, etc. When the team gets in this mode, it's can be painful to watch and quite detrimental (look at games 1 & 2 of the NYK for recent examples).
💯 This.
Yes, and this is also why three-culture is not a great match. Lends itself to lazy spells.
That said, Bird, McHale, and Parish used to have lazy games but they were so good, so much better than the competition on most nights that they could turn it on and usually pull it out. Today?s Cs are better than most of the competition just not to the same degree.
What's interesting is that LeBum pioneered the "cruise through the regular season putting in 50% effort until you get to the playoffs" where he could be lazy during the regular season, but he was able to switch it on for the playoffs. I don't know if some of our guys are able to do the same, because you do build habits during the regular season, that's the whole point of it, so that by the time the playoffs arrive you're operating on reflex.
During both series it felt like they were still playing games in January or February where if they lost so what, there's more games to come up. Unfortunately for all of Jaylen's "you can't just beat us twice, you gotta beat us 4 times", well they didn't play well enough to stop the Knicks doing that. I know they had injuries but you can't use that as an excuse when you have 2 games where you led by 20 and lost, and another game where you led by 14 and lost. That's just a lack of urgency.
Maybe it was never meant to be...maybe they needed this humiliation, and possibly a change in personnel, to reignite that fire in them.
