Brad Stevens is Not Happy, and Has Blunt Assessment of Boston Celtics Playoff Failure

Brad Stevens put his iron fist inside a velvet glove and met with the media on Monday, giving direct and blunt assessment of this Boston Celtics team and its loss to the Philadelphia 76ers. His midwestern charm was in full view, but it was undoubtedly covering an angry facade. And sometimes he could barely even do that.

“This is hard for me to reconcile three days after the playoffs, because I'm pissed,” Stevens told the assembled media at the Auerbach Center. “I'd rather be playing New York tonight. We all would, but we also, as I look back, we didn't have a team that was as experienced or certainly as ready for that moment as we've had in the past … but when you're in the midst of it and you have a chance, you wish you could still be playing.”

The team he put together was never designed for a deep playoff run, but as the season wore on, players blew past their expectations. Suddenly, the Celtics were lumped in among the league’s favorites. They won 56 games and Jayson Tatum returned, almost reaching his usual form. But once the playoffs started, it was almost as if the regular season Celtics packed up and left, leaving behind a team that fell into old habits.

“We have to play well in the regular season to get to where we want to go and so we don't want to undersell the regular season,” Stevens said. “That said, as I look at it honestly, I think that how we played against the best teams is relevant and should be taken into account as we look at our team moving forward.”

Their record against the best teams in the league was not great, and what give Stevens the iron fist is his willingness to look closely at what’s real and what’s not, process it, and make tough decisions.

“I've got a little sign above my, above my desk, that says, ‘What do you want, what's true, and how do you get there?’” he said. “And there's no question what we want. There's no question, when you look at what's true, that, though we did a lot of good things, we lost in the first round. And we were also 3-11 against the top three seeds in the West and the other top two in the East. And so we've got to get better. And that's been the communication in here, when just talking to the team.”

The regular season was a success in terms of developing role players and developing a plan for winning games no matter who was on the floor. But part of what killed them against the Sixers was how those role players regressed to some degree, and how the ways Boston won certain tough shooting games were taken away. And a Boston’s second chance points dried up, so did the points on the scoreboard.

“I thought we really struggled to generate good looks against Philly,” Stevens said. “Our first shot offense wasn't very good the whole series, but we really got a lot of good looks on second chances and off the glass, and I thought they did a really good job [of preventing offensive rebounds.]”

The Celtics have been criticized for the three-point shooting volume, but Stevens insists that everyone in the building wants to get dunks more than anything. The problem against the Sixers is that those opportunities weren’t there.

“We’ve got to figure out a way to do better in that,” he said. “One of the things that we've got to figure out is how to have more of an impact at the rim. And I think we do need to add to our team to do that. … We struggled to get to where we wanted to go on offense a lot of the series, but particularly in those last four games when those four perimeter defenders, who are all very good, had [Joel] Embiid standing behind them.”

We can try to read the tea leaves in that quote and try to figure out what kind of move Stevens wants to make. Stressing Embiid standing behind the Sixers’ perimeter defenders, thus making them all better, suggests the Celtics need to find a way to get someone like Embiid out of the paint. When you look at the bigger picture, Boston’s future playoff runs will also include a path through Detroit’s Jalen Duren, New York’s Mitchell Robinson, Cleveland’s Evan Mobley and Jarrett Allen, and other staunch defenses. Finding a stretch big worth defending may be the direction Stevens is talking about.

Stevens allowed for a lot of scenarios, but seemed to be leaning towards something closer to the tinkering side of the scale rather than the fireworks side.

“If we do a better job defending the three at the end of the third quarter in Game 5, we're probably talking about what our plans are for Game 2 tonight,” Stevens said. “So there are margins here. Our margin for error needs to get bigger, and at the same time, I don't think we're way far away.”

The biggest issue, perhaps, might not have anything to do with adding a player, necessarily. It’s that the Celtics have a history of relaxing in big moments. Here’s a piece I wrote on it nearly three years ago to the day. Here's another one from December of 2019. Boston’s inability to handle prosperity has been a problem for a long time, and Stevens knows it.

“You go back to our championship year and we did that in the Miami series and the Cleveland series, with a very experienced good team,” Stevens said of the team’s penchant for losing games it shouldn’t. “Now, you go back to the Miami series three years ago, we had a big lead in Game 1. You go back to the New York series last year, big leads in Games 1 and 2. You go back to Game 5 this year, and so to me it is somewhat prosperity within the game, and being able to, in those moments, be even more dialed in and locked in and recognize that …

“Those are things we’ve got to get better with. I don’t think we’re the only team. I think there’s a lot of teams with how many teams shoot as well as they shoot, and how people can go on flurries, that deal with that. But I don’t think we should ignore it. I think that’s a big talking point for sure. And I think for a lot of those cases, for whatever reason, we slowed down. And when you slow down in the playoffs and you’re trying to protect something, whatever the case may be, the guys you’re playing against, these are the best players on the other teams and they’re the best athletes left in the league, right? Those four guys we were trying to drive the ball against this week, those four guys are elite athletes, and they’re hard to beat individually. And so you have to, you really have to play great to get what you want. And if you take your foot off the gas at any point, it’s gonna come back to bite you.”

Stevens hinted that the extreme tanking in the league this season may have inflated everyone’s win totals, including Boston’s. Maybe there was some fool’s gold involved in the 56 wins. He was clear about the Sixers deserving to win, and that it was on the Celtics to finish the job, and they didn’t. This team was never built to go deep into the playoffs, but with Tatum and Brown leading the charge, role players growing into meaningful contributors, and Mazzulla coaching everyone up and overachieving, it was reasonable to expect them to finish after going up 3-1.

They didn’t. Now things will change.

“Obviously these guys are really committed to growth. I thought the coaches did a really good job of helping guys all get better,” Stevens said. “But there's another step to take. And whether you're in my shoes, or you're in any of our support staff’s shoes, or if you're in our coaches’ shoes, or if you're in our players’ shoes, we got to get better. So that's going to be the charge and the focus. So we'll figure out how best to do that. It'll probably be a balance of development and, at some point, obviously, with the draft coming up and free agency coming up, and trying to figure out how to make our team as good as it can be.”

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