Deciphering the Messages a 'Pissed' Brad Stevens is Sending to the Boston Celtics

Brad Stevens is not happy with how the Celtics season ended.

“I think this is why this is hard for me to reconcile three days after the playoffs. Because I'm pissed,” he said during his end-of-season wrap-up media availability at the Auerbach Center on Wednesday. “I'd rather be playing New York tonight.”

Instead, the Celtics are licking their wounds after an embarrassing opening series loss to the Philadelphia 76ers, a series where they held a 3-1 lead and lost three out of four home games. Stevens made it clear that some things have to change.

But what? Stevens made some pointed comments during the half hour he was answering questions. Here are a few of those comments, and a look at what he might have meant.

What do you want, what’s true, how do you get there?

“We came up short. And so now the job is to do an honest assessment. 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?’ 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. I think obviously these guys are really committed to growth. I thought the coaches did a really good job of helping guys all get better. But there's another step to take.”

Stevens brought up his little sign for a reason. The “What’s true?” part is the focus here, which is why he brought up the record against the best teams this season. He did that unprompted as part of an opening statement, so that wasn’t even a response to a question.

The message on this one is clear: Congratulations for overachieving, but everyone upstairs recognizes that's not enough. When he talks about an honest assessment of what this team is, it will be clear that they need players who good in relation to other players in the league, not just against what the lower expectations of the season were. I'll add one bonus quote to this section to hammer the "honest assessment" part home.

"When you get beat in the first round, you're not there. So I think that the moves to get there, obviously you have to consider the other teams that are at those levels, and I think the other thing that you have to consider, especially for next year, is there were a lot of teams in the NBA that were playing for draft positioning this year. That will not be the case next year. So the league's gonna be a lot better. The regular season could be a lot harder, and it will probably give you a better indication of what everybody really is.”

Translation: 56 wins was nice but more than few of those came against tanking teams, so that number might be a bit inflated. There won't be as many gimmes on next year's schedule, so running it back with what they have might lead to a harsh reality check.

They can't do that. Stevens knows that. What's true about this Celtics season is that they were a great regular season story. Not to go full Boston arrogance on anyone here, but fun regular season stories aren't what the Celtics are about.

Getting more at the rim

“We had a hard time generating really good looks on that first shot. So we’ve got to figure out a way to do better in that, and I think that 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. So I think that everybody plays a role in that, but at the end of that game [7], [Joel] Embiid was standing at the rim on all those possessions, or a lot of those possessions, right? And so I thought the shots we took, with the exception of Jaylen [Brown]’s top-of-the-key three and the one where he got in the middle of the lane, and then Payton [Pritchard]'s open shot, I thought they were really well-defended. I thought 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 Embiid standing behind them.”

There can be no clearer message to the team than telling them ‘we don’t have anyone who can do this really important thing.’

I read this as finding a center to pull guys like Embiid away from the basket. Stevens specifically mentioning that Embiid was standing behind the perimeter defenders to make them better tells me that will be one of the first things he addresses.

It could mean that he wants another ball handler on the perimeter to break down the defense, but I think this is about adding a stretch big somehow.

Side note: I still don’t think the Celtics challenged Embiid enough. He’s too big and too slow to be as effective as normal. I think the Celtics have paid him too much deference, and it irks me. They talk so much about the killer whale mentality and then they let Embiid off the hook. No Orca worth its salt would miss an opportunity to feast.

Prosperity problem

“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. 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, yeah, we could have played better in Game 7, we could have played better on the road in Game 6, but we had a chance to close that out on the road in Game 5. … 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 if you take your foot off the gas at any point, it’s gonna come back to bite you. Again, was it a little bit of us doing that? Was it a lot of Philly just playing really well in that stretch? Yeah, it could have been. But there’s enough of three years, those three years, I agree with you. And I’d even say our championship year. I mean, we need to get better in those moments.”

I find it interesting that Stevens is focused on those three years, because this has been a problem for a long time. Back in 2019, when Stevens was still the coach, I wrote “the Boston Celtics are the definition of the Jekyll and Hyde stereotype. They’ve faced great teams and won. They’ve faced bad teams and lost. If anything, this Boston team has proven they can’t handle prosperity. The moment they have a chance to relax, they take it.”

You can even look at the 2022 NBA Finals, where Boston led 2-1 and gave up a 17-3 run at the end of Game 4, missing a golden opportunity to take a 3-1 lead on the Warriors.

But Stevens is still just focusing on three years, which is the Joe Mazzulla era. This feels like a message to the coaching staff that it’s on them to get away from grinding the game to a halt down the stretch of playoff games.

The Celtics came into this season promising to play fast, instead they had the lowest pace (the number of possessions over 48 minutes) in the NBA at 95.58. That number dropped to 89.71 in the fourth quarter of this year’s playoffs. That's not an aberration either. They went from 96.59 in the regular season last year to 87.45 in the fourth quarters of playoff games.

Almost every team slows things down in these situations, but the Celtics do it to an extreme. Stevens has seen enough of it.

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