Celtics coach Brad Stevens did not choose for his team to go to London smack dab in the middle of its march to retain the top seed in the Eastern Conference this season.
Yet the coach is trying his best to embrace the spotlight it brings to the franchise, its players and the NBA this week, while doing his typical diligence to try to make sure the English hangover doesn’t sidetrack the Celtics once they return home.
"It’s a [...]
Celtics coach Brad Stevens did not choose for his team to go to London smack dab in the middle of its march to retain the top seed in the Eastern Conference this season.
Yet the coach is trying his best to embrace the spotlight it brings to the franchise, its players and the NBA this week, while doing his typical diligence to try to make sure the English hangover doesn’t sidetrack the Celtics once they return home.
“It’s a great opportunity to spend time [together], to be with the team,” he said during a conference call from London on Wednesday morning in advance of Thursday afternoon’s game against the Philadelphia 76ers. “We had a team dinner [Tuesday]. Anytime you travel abroad, get to be able to represent the NBA and on a global stage [Thursday], it’s a great opportunity. Everybody’s looking forward to that.
“But we have spent some time thinking about how we’re going to manage it appropriately. From travel, to practice time, and rest, everything else, not only for [the London game] but for the next few weeks. We have three home games coming up [next Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday] and then we have a West Coast trip after that. We’ve spent a lot of time focused on that. It’s something we need to do because it is quite a bit of travel.”
While the team will have to contend with traveling nearly 5,500 miles in just over a two-week span between Thursday’s London game and the back-to-back against the Los Angeles Lakers and Los Angeles Clippers on Jan. 23 and 24, they are poised to be doing so with as much firepower as they’ve had since Gordon Hayward went down with a leg and ankle injury on opening night.
Al Horford, who missed Sunday’s game in Brooklyn with knee pain, made the trip to England and is expected to play on Thursday. Marcus Morris, who has been restricted to about 20 minutes a night since he returned from his own knee issue on Christmas Day, has been cleared for longer stints with no more scheduled days off in his rehab.
While Morris was in the starting lineup as a power forward with Horford at center when he first returned from the injury early in the season, he was mostly coming off the bench as a scorer in the second unit through the end of November and when he came back from aggravating the knee in December.
Stevens said he will continue to go with matchup-based lineups that include Morris starting alongside Horford some nights — as he did against the Cleveland Cavaliers last Wednesday — and Aron Baynes starting at center with Horford at power forward other nights.
"It will go game to game as far as the starting-or-coming-off-the-bench thing,” Stevens said. “I think that’s been productive for our team. Even though his minute restriction has been upped a little, I think ultimately you’re still conscious of his minutes.
“We want to make sure that we’re progressing so that we’re playing our best. And he’s a big part of us playing our best.”
When it comes to looking far down the road this season, it is becoming increasingly difficult to look at a potential long playoff run without looking at the stream of photos on social media, including one on Celtics president of basketball operations Danny Ainge’s Twitter account posted Tuesday, that include Hayward with less and less hardware on his surgically repaired ankle and tibia.
While Stevens said “nothing has changed with his timeline” and “this is what was expected” during his conference call, Hayward has said his “mind is open” to a comeback this season.
Stevens cautioned about getting too worked up about the implications of the brace-less and boot-less photos making the rounds this week.
“No change in our expectations, or in from what we thought at the time of the surgery,” Stevens said. “This is the process of the rehab, and everything else, after the surgery happened, and after the surgery went well.”