In recent seasons, the Boston Celtics have followed a common NBA practice and installed a pull-down screen to hide their locker room whiteboard from prying eyes. But there's a new sign in the team's locker room this season that's been positioned with every intention of being seen.
On it are five declarations that second-year coach Brad Stevens hopes his team will remember as they head to the court. The sign reads:
WE WILL
(1) Sprint to set OUR defense.
(2) Execute OUR defense with multiple efforts to completion.
(3) Be TOUGH with the ball.
(4) Play unselfishly with pace and space to get great shots.
(5) Dominate effort plays.
The sign hammers home some of the key points of emphasis since Stevens arrived in Boston last season.
Not surprisingly, it leads off with defense. Stevens has maintained a desire to code a defensive DNA that serves as the backbone of this team. This season, the team tinkered with its philosophies to match its personnel -- with the addition of rookie Marcus Smart boosting the perimeter defense, and the team's lack of a pure size and rim protection forcing it to adjust how bigs defend from the back line. It resulted in the team owning the best defensive rating in the league in the preseason. But before any of that goes into motion, Stevens wants his team to get back and get set, forcing the opposition to beat Boston in a 5-on-5 half-court game and eliminating the higher-value transition opportunities that teams often feast on. In fact, one of the common buzzwords this preseason with Stevens has been "defensive stance" and the notion of how important body positioning is from the start of the play to the finish.
What do the Celtics mean by "OUR defense"? The team is still figuring that out, but early returns suggest the Celtics will lean on their strengths. Perimeter defense, with the addition of Smart, a healthy Rajon Rondo and an All-Defense-caliber talent in Avery Bradley, is going to allow Boston to pester ball handlers, disrupting opponents from getting into their offense and forcing late-clock shots. One thing that Stevens stressed this week was that, despite Boston's depth, it cannot possibly sustain 48 minutes of full-court pressure on the ball.
"I don't think you can do it with one [player], I think the game is too long. And I think you have to pick your spots with three, to be honest," said Stevens. "But I do think it's a luxury and it's what we've said is our strength -- our perimeter quickness is something that we identified from really the minute we drafted Marcus Smart, and knowing that you've got Avery back and you've got a guy like Rondo -- that's three guys that can really, really get into the ball -- and Phil Pressey is another one.
"We're going to have to continue to utilize that, and appropriately. Nobody can do that for 48 minutes, and two guys probably can't do it for 24 each. So we're just going to have to do it by committee."
We've seen the Celtics have success disrupting ball handlers already. Bradley forced an eight-second violation against Philadelphia in the preseason, while Smart has picked a few of the league's top guards (Kyle Lowry, Deron Williams) above the 3-point arc.
The key there, though, is finishing possessions. The Celtics often did a decent job last year of forcing an initial stop, only to be caught out of position while rotating to help, and teams would pounce on second-chance opportunities or find wide-open shooters whose defenders had wandered. Boston's defense has the potential to be good this season, but no defense is good enough to overcome giving opponents multiple opportunities. The Celtics must finish possessions and -- as Wednesday's season-opener proves -- they must learn how to finish games, even in the rare position of playing from ahead.
"Tough with the ball" is another favorite line for Stevens. Boiled down, it's the idea of possession. The Celtics were plagued by turnovers last season and guards have to be tougher with the ball when defenses apply pressure. None of Boston's primary bigs -- Jared Sullinger, Kelly Olynyk, or Brandon Bass -- are pure centers, but they must endure the physicality that comes when playing around the basket. In the end, Boston must value possession. These young Celtics simply don't have the margin of error that other teams have and will have a hard time beating opponents if they don't go full throttle and maximize every possession.
The Miami Heat helped cement "pace and space" in the NBA lexicon. Boston's personnel is heavy on shooters and quality passers, so it shouldn't be a surprise that the team is trying to maximize its talents in a similar fashion. For the same reason that Stevens wants his team to get set defensively, he wants his team to crank the tempo after defensive stops and attempt to take advantage of opponents when they are not set. Without a pure center, Boston's best chance at unclogging the paint is to draw bigs to the perimeter to defend the likes of Olynyk and Sullinger, which should open up additional space for players such as Jeff Green and Rondo to attack. The other principle in play here is movement, something we saw the Spurs exploit in the NBA Finals when they shifted Miami's defense by mixing constant ball movement with consistent off-ball movement.
Even in Boston's season-opener, we saw Rondo operating off the ball more at times. The team has identified that, as successful as Rondo is in the typical high pick-and-roll, there's also value in him catching the ball on the wings and attacking.
Rondo had mentioned that he studied Tony Parker's off-the-ball movement this offseason, and it hammers home a desire to create unique ways to open the floor.
"First off, Rajon is an accomplished guy, so the last thing that I want to do -- or that's fair to him -- would be to try to compare him to somebody else," Stevens said of the Parker comparison. "The only thing that I would say is, he's a guy that studies the game, and he's a guy that sees what's successful for him and other people. He wants to try to figure out how to be the most successful he can be.
"Our emphasis is on, obviously, moving the basketball. We really feel like, and I think he feels like, the more that he moves early and gets it back with a live dribble, the better that he is. And we saw that a couple of times [Wednesday against Brooklyn]. Now, he was also great a couple times going off the high pick-and-roll without any ball movement prior to that. We'll just balance that, and we'll weight that.
"But he didn't have the ball very long when you looked at the total number of minutes that he had the ball [Wednesday] night. But he used a lot of percentage of possessions because he's an active guy that we want to get the ball back to."
No. 5 focuses on the intangibles -- a simple desire to want it more than the other team. The times that we've seen the often stoic Stevens the most emphatic on the sideline is often when a player goes to the ground to make a play for the ball or goes sprawling into the stands trying to keep a possession alive. Stevens wants his teams to play with grit. These Celtics might not be the most talented team in the league, but Stevens is trying to accentuate their strengths in hopes of masking their deficiencies.