Did the Celts change their strategy yesterday?

[droopdog7]

Since the Big 3 came together, there is no question that the Celts have been the team that gives kobe the most trouble.  No team can stop him, because after all, he does take like 25 shots a game minimum.  But the Celts have come the closest.

We lost game 7 even though we stopped kobe so I wonder if the game plan was different yesterday?  Don't worry about kobe but make sure to stop the rest. 

Now, I understand that having TA and or Posey helps to stop kobe.  But I don't think we made ANY effort yesterday to double kobe or even overload the D in his direction.  I know for a fact he was not doubled a single time.

[wdleehi]

If Kobe wants to jack up shots, no one is going to stop him from launching the shots, not even his own team.

[mgent]

This isn't the old Kobe.  This isn't even the Kobe of 3 years ago.  If he's determined to put up 30 shots each game he'll start missing eventually.  Some nights he'll be lights out but those are rarer now.

I don't think we did a horrible job on Kobe (except for Marquis but I expected that).  We caused him to miss 13 shots and the refs (not us) only sent him to the line 7 times.  Everyone else we did excellent job on and that's key.  The only guy that gave us trouble was Odom and short of getting Scals back there's nothing we can really do about that (baby has no chance of guarding him).

[Fafnir]

Baby does a good job against Odom in most areas of the court. He gets in trouble when Odom gets a head of steam going left, but the Lakers aren't the type of team to milk one play like that. (top of key Odom with the ball)

[fairweatherfan]

Our strategy on Kobe is the same as most stars - play him straight up and only help if he gets by the first defender.  Otherwise, he can jack up as many shots as we want and Doc is confident he'll be inefficient and his teammates' production will be crippled. 

An underrated aspect of our W is that when Kobe went into hero mode his teammates stopped crashing the boards and hustling on D.  Selfish play takes teammates out of the game mentally even on unrelated plays.