It's time for Brad Stevens to be proactive when it comes to changes

Brad Stevens is not one to overreact. He prepares hard and doesn’t try to let one game or a stretch of games influence him too much in the big picture. Still, as the Celtics dropped to 1-5 after the All-Star Break with a 115-104 home defeat against the Houston Rockets, it’s fair to wonder whether his hesitancy to shake things up is helping to prevent this team from getting on the right track ahead of the postseason.

Up until now, it’s easy to see why Stevens has elected to stand pat with the starting group he turned to in mid-November, promoting Marcus Smart and Marcus Morris to the starting five in favor of Gordon Hayward and Jaylen Brown. The switch wasn’t a permanent promotion at first (Brown was hurt initially when Smart started), but it ended up being kept in place for good when the team starting winning with that group.

Smart and Morris were two of the most consistent Celtics at that juncture, doing things the C’s needed on any given night like shooting the lights out (Morris) or taking the pressure off Irving on the defensive end (Smart). Other tweaks have been regularly suggested here at BSJ to the bench rotation as well but the personnel for the large part has gone unchanged for three months now. That made sense when this team was winning to a degree, but the equation has changed now.

For as good as Morris has been during the first few months of the year, he’s been just as bad over the past few weeks. The veteran forward bottomed out on Sunday afternoon, going scoreless with a pair of ugly turnovers and defensive possessions in just 17 minutes (minus-15) before being benched for the final 18 minutes of the game. He didn’t play in the fourth quarter on Friday night either and is shooting 27 percent from 3 since the All-Star Break.

“It was nothing to do with Marcus per se,” Stevens explained of the benching after the loss. “It was more to do with I just wanted to ... by then we were down 30 and I wanted to see (Aron) Baynes and Al (Horford) play together a little bit. We’re a little hamstrung right now for a while, while Baynes is on a minutes restriction, and we’ll have to figure that out, but I wanted to see that pairing and then I wanted to give (Daniel) Theis a chance to play because Theis’ energy can do what it did. You know, ... he would be the first to tell you he’s not perfect but at the same time he really plays hard and when you’re blitzing and running around like we wanted to at the end of that third, early fourth, and to get ourselves back in it, he’s going to be a big part of that. So that was more of a decision just to get those guys minutes.”

The Celtics have a healthy squad now that Baynes is back (he looked understandably rusty in 12 minutes on Sunday) and that luxury affords Stevens a number of different options now when it comes to his lineups. Going big or small with several various groups can be done without worrying about leaving the depth chart exposed in a certain area on any given night.

Despite this luxury, Stevens has stuck to his guns in the midst of the worst adversity this team has seen in his tenure as head coach. Production and effort have come and gone in the midst of a brutal past month but there has been little that has changed from a personnel standpoint on a nightly basis. Stevens has stuck with his guys and the groups that sometimes work, but he has failed to adjust on a timely basis to the fact that certain individuals have failed to play to expectations in different stretches.

Morris is the latest example of this. The Celtics' starting lineup has not been a problem every night but when it has performed well lately, it has generally done so in spite of Morris rather than in conjunction with him. The fact that he played so well during the first half of the year does not give him the right to big minutes when he’s underperforming. Stevens feels a strong loyalty to a lot of these guys even when they struggle (Rozier and Morris being two clear examples) and it’s clearly backfired on him when it comes to the win-loss column. There are only two guys on this team right now (Irving, Horford) that deserve the benefit of the doubt on a bad night or over a bad stretch of games, yet Stevens keeps sticking with his veterans regardless and sounds like he’s still leaning against a potential shakeup to the starting lineup or the rotation as a whole after the loss on Sunday.

“If I was dead sold that a combination change would give us a jolt, we would have done it a long time ago,” Stevens said. “Our starts have been good. Our bench up until this little five-game stretch had really improved playing together and still have had moments. We all just have to play better. If the right thing to do is to tweak that, we’ll tweak it and we’ll try anything. But we need to fix our play no matter what part of the game it is and who’s on the court.”

This is a bit of a contradiction though since Stevens really hasn’t tried much of anything different all year long. Not switching it up made sense for a while when the team was winning after a 10-10 start (November-January) but the equation has changed now. This team is in a rut and isn’t shooting like it used to (27 percent since All-Star Break). Certain players are ascending (Jaylen Brown) while others are on the decline (Morris). Deep bench pieces that have seen spot success (Wanamaker, Ojeleye) don’t get a chance even when role players struggle, only when guys are hurt.

Stevens came under some heat from the media Sunday about the possibility of a starting shift but cautioned against the drawbacks of a move.

“The first six minutes of the game weren’t that good today, but have generally been the least of our concerns,” Stevens said of potentially inserting Jaylen Brown into the starting five. “The start of the third quarter has been a problem at times. He’s played a lot, he’s played well and he’s been in at the end. He’s doing a good job, and the other thing you have to factor in is that he’s doing a good job because he’s comfortable with who he’s playing with. That’s the hard part sometimes.”

It’s a brutal situation for Stevens as a whole since he doesn’t know what he’s going to get from certain guys on any given night. Any head coach would be losing sleep trying to maximize the talent out of this group. Count Horford as one of the guys that don’t have the answers.

“I’m really not sure,” Horford said about the recent woes. “I just think that we’ve had some good moments. Right now, unfortunately, we are going through a really bad stretch. This is when our group, we need to make sure that we stay together and even closer because I know it’s hard. We’re the first ones that don’t want to lose but we just need to continue to work because we feel like we can be better than this.”

Part of working through the problem is trying different things. There’s no guarantee Stevens needs to stick with a switch but the status quo with this group has not been good enough for a few weeks now. At this point, there’s no harm in trying something new. The head coach has been dealt a tough hand by Danny Ainge but it’s up to him to pivot and make the best of what he has on any given night. The sooner that happens, the better chance this team will have of salvaging a season that is on the verge of being lost. He waited too long to make changes to the starters early in the year and doing so again now, whether it’s a tweak to the starting lineup or a rotation shift could prove costly.