The NBA head coach’s job might be one of the most misunderstood in sports.
People have romanticized ways of thinking of what a basketball coach is, or should be. There are visions of Gene Hackman in Hoosiers, or Bobby Knight at Indiana, or even Red Auerbach here in Boston. Maybe some people think back to their high school or college coaches.
In 2021’s NBA, the head coach is more coworker than authoritarian overlord. He is, in a sense, middle management; he’s in charge, he does the scheduling, and he runs the day-to-day show. But he has bosses and, should he lose control of the workplace, it’s his butt on the line.
It’s not a perfect analogy, but I think it sets the tone for what we’re talking about here. As the Celtics trudge through a season that has become brutally monotonous, the biggest portion of blame pie is being set in front of Brad Stevens.
And that’s fine. That’s part of a coach’s job. And he certainly deserves some of the blame.
After Wednesday night’s loss to the Dallas Mavericks, Stevens said that this is “a team I’m coaching, so it should all fall on me.” But there’s only so much he can really do here. Let’s look at his options.
1. Scheme: Stevens’ teams are generally known for their defense. If nothing else, he’s been able to get his teams to defend. This year’s team and their 21st-ranked defense, is the exception. What can Stevens do about it?
He can change it, but there’s no time to practice this season. Teams are not practicing at all, and it’s showing up in the on-court product. Stevens has tried to mix in some zone from time to time, but that’s also been on the fly.
The zone was effective against the Warriors two months ago, and Stevens was asked about practicing it to get it right.
“We didn't do any zone in practice,” he said. “You want to call our zone practice was against San Antonio and against LA, but that's why every minute matters. Only thing we did yesterday was watch clips of it, talk about it, and make sure that we were at least in -- kind of understand what the challenge is with each game each night but we don't have much time to practice live right now.”
Offensively, the Celtics have transitioned into a more dribble hand-off heavy offense with the one big in the high post and an emphasis on cutting. With two bigs no longer starting, this has been effective in getting the ball moving. Starting Robert Williams has helped that (more on that in a moment).
Stevens preaches ball movement, but the players still have to do it.
“Brad has zero responsibility for shooting (11-47) from three last night on most of them open shots,” Danny Ainge said in his weekly radio appearance. “He doesn't have responsibility when players improvise are playing with lack of emotion after they miss shots. The only thing that he could do is to yank his best players out of the game and go with the other players.”
2. Lineups: The Celtics went with double-bigs earlier this season. It was an early disaster that was less so later, but it was never entirely good. It took away driving lanes and made the spacing tough.
Stevens had Daniel Theis, a big he liked and who worked with his other starters. He had Robert Williams, a big who almost immediately staked a claim for more minutes. And he had Tristan Thompson, who was signed to a new contract.
Thompson was the better big early on because Theis was out of position. Once Theis got comfortable and was able to get some minutes on his own, he seemed to be the best option. Then as Robert Williams kept getting better with the second unit, he clearly needed to play more.
So Stevens kept going with double-bigs because it was the only way to get all three playing time, and sitting Thompson wasn’t an option because benching Ainge’s new signing, a guy brought in to partly be a leader on this team, could have backfired. This was the most elegant solution on a team with three centers with claims to minutes.
Stevens’ rotations have been all over the place, partly because he starts every season experimenting, and partly because he has few options. Let’s look at what he’s had to deal with.
- Kemba Walker wasn’t available to start the season.
- Jayson Tatum, Robert Williams, Tristan Thompson, Romeo Langford, and Carsen Edwards all caught COVID-19
- Marcus Smart missed about a month with a strained calf
- Payton Pritchard missed nearly two weeks with a knee injury
- Jaylen Brown has been dealing with tendinitis in his knee
- Semi Ojelye is now out with a strained oblique
It’s pretty hard to have a set rotation with all of these absences.
Aaron Nesmith is a flashpoint in this discussion, because on one hand he needs to play, but on the other, the Celtics need to win games. It’s not clear these two circles overlap on the Venn diagram. Still, Nesmith is a ball of ridiculous energy who sometimes seems to be more daredevil on the floor than basketball player, and sometimes a shot of Nesmith energy could be helpful.
But getting the right mix of players feels like a crapshoot sometimes. Guys who do well in one game end up not doing well in another, which leads to a conundrum. Players need consistency to play well, but they’re not playing well enough to earn consistent minutes. Without practices to earn more time, the reliance on game action to determine who should play more leads to wild swings in playing time. Guys go from starting, to DNP’s, to being sixth man.
3. In-game adjustments:
Stevens wants his guys to figure things out on the floor, so he has a tendency to wait on calling timeouts. It’s fair to criticize his use of them, but it’s also important to understand a couple of things about NBA timeouts.
First, here are the rules:
Each team is entitled to seven (7) charged timeouts during regulation play. Each team is limited to no more than four (4) timeouts in the fourth period. Each team will be limited to two (2) team timeouts after the later of (i) the three-minute mark of the fourth period or (ii) the conclusion of the second mandatory timeout of the fourth period.
Of those seven timeouts, four are mandatory. Each team
must
take one timeout per quarter. So if Boston is rolling for the first five minutes of the game against Houston and has no reason to call a timeout, the refs will call one for them at the first dead ball after the 6:59 mark.
So it’s impossible for the home team to have more than three timeouts after that 6:59 mark or so of the fourth quarter. After the three-minute mark, another one gets taken away, leaving them two over the last two minutes.
That doesn’t leave a ton, for the rest of the game. Also, a team needs a timeout in order to challenge a call, so if they run out and there’s an obvious blown call, then they’re out of luck.
That complicates things for Stevens, who should probably just call a timeout before the snowball gets too far down the hill when teams make their inevitable runs. He could probably make some better use of the “use it or lose it” timeout around that three-minute mark of the fourth, even calling it to get guys another minute off their feet for the stretch run.
Other than that, the timeouts aren’t as simple as you might think.
Also,
maybe Stevens does need to do what Ainge suggested and pull his best players if they’re underperforming. The risk there, and I'm sure Stevens is attuned to this, is the public embarrassment of his players.
I know, I can already hear you saying “they’re embarrassing themselves enough” out there, but Stevens knows that a public benching like that, in the middle of the game, will dominate the postgame media questions from people like me. I’m sure there’s a part of him that doesn’t want to have Brown and Tatum get a barrage of questions about being benched when this season is already going this poorly.
On the other hand, that could be what snaps some reality into them, or whomever is playing poorly.
4. Motivation:
There’s no room for hand-holding in the NBA, and the notion that Stevens needs to constantly motivate his team is laughable. These are the elite of the elite; a league of about 500 human beings occupying the most coveted basketball jobs on the planet.
If they can’t find a way to get up for games and stay engaged, then that’s on them.
Stevens does have some role to play in managing the personalities and egos on this team. And, frankly, the circumstances of this season have not allowed for the necessary downtime to escape, as a team, and build some of the necessary off-court camaraderie that they usually can. There are no team dinners or group outings allowed, especially on the road.
“Can’t do anything. Literally can’t do anything,” Walker recently said. “We can go outside for, what, an hour I guess now, but everything is just different. Like, you can’t go to dinner, can't go visit your friends that you have on the road. It's just most of the time you’re just kind of cooped up in the room or just around the hotel. It’s just different.”
This all puts more pressure on the players to find their own motivation. Stevens can’t come up with “rah rah” speeches like Al Pacino in
Any Given Sunday
. Maybe if he had a team of Hollywood writers working for him every day, he could come up with something good from time to time. If he can get an orchestra to play something dramatic that crescendos at the peak of his speech, then maybe the Celtics can complete their comebacks.
Or the guys on the floor can be the professionals they’re paid to be.
5. Attitude:
He conducts himself in a certain manner on TV, but I can tell you that if you get to see the entirety of a game from a close enough vantage point, you’ll see Stevens displaying plenty of emotion.
He’s not Mr. Rogers. He’s an NBA coach, and you don’t get to the NBA at any capacity without being able to match some of the energy players bring.
Stevens is a polite midwesterner when he’s speaking publicly. When he gets onto the court, he’s a ball coach. When he’s in the huddle talking to his guys, he’s calm and collected.
Is there more that he can do sometimes? Sure. There might be a time or two where Stevens should go for a technical foul just to shock his team a bit. Maybe there’s even an occasion where he can get tossed as a way to jolt his team.
However, those are not tools that are used lightly. You get to play that card maybe once per season. And if it happens too often it either becomes expected or it loses its shock value.
So where in all of this is the real truth about what Brad Stevens can do?
There isn’t much room to change the scheme at this point. The guys are either going to do it or they’re not. The lineups are a mess, but circumstances are heavily at play here. With six different starting lineups over the past six games, all out of necessity, there’s too much flux for any consistency.
Maybe Stevens can tweak how he uses his timeouts. Maybe he can change his substitution pattern, or even pull the occasional benching to send a message, but that’s about it. The motivation thing is an overblown fantasy that doesn’t exist at the NBA level, and the notion that Stevens is too passive for his team is a flat-out misconception.
Here’s what I see.
I see a team that’s still engaged with him. A lot of fans want to believe that the team has tuned Stevens out, but I simply don’t see it. Those cracks haven't shown themselves. Stevens isn’t a perfect coach, but he’s still a pretty good one, and this season hasn’t been kind to him or his team.
I’ll leave with this one question that I have come to ask of every mind-boggling adventure this season: How much of this is real, and how much of this is a function of this weird, dumb NBA season?
Personally, I see a lot of things at play here that are unique to this season and this season alone. The amount of COVID-19 absences alone are evidence of that. Stevens can be better, but what’s happening now isn’t all on him.
