We still don’t know much about Ime Udoka as a head coach, but his defensive reputation certainly precedes him. His work handling the defense in Brooklyn, which had the fourth-best defensive rating in last year’s playoffs, and in prior stops in Philadelphia and San Antonio, checked off one of the first boxes on Brad Stevens’ list of requirements in a new coach. He was a defense-first coach who was now hiring his replacement, so it’s no surprise that things clicked.
“I've had enough interviews to kind of feel the vibe right away and I felt that with Brad,” Udoka said on the team’s official podcast. “Natural, you know, alignment; the way we talked, the way we thought about the game, and the direction we saw the team going and so from there I felt good about it.”
Now he’s running his own team and starting to give more of a sense of what he’s trying to accomplish.
“Be disruptive overall. ... We’re doing some things to blow up certain actions, we want to make it difficult on teams,” he said after the team’s Wednesday practice. “Overall last year, we were middle of the pack defensively, and there’s a lot of areas we can clean up and improve on. So we’re focusing on those, but the main thing is just being very aggressive.”
At their best defensive selves, the Celtics used to force turnovers that led to easy points, especially for Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown. Without those breakaways, scoring becomes that much harder. It doesn't take an expert to realize that scoring is easier when no one is in front of you, and that’s going to be the goal.
“We’re overdoing it somewhat in training camp because we know obviously during the season stuff starts to dissipate a little bit,” Udoka said. “But the main thing is communication and being aggressive, and being proactive.”
It doesn’t hurt that Boston has added players with good defensive resumes. Josh Richardson and Dennis Schröder will help solidify the backcourt defense with Marcus Smart. Al Horford brings his incredible defensive IQ back into the fold and will help Robert Williams become better on the back line.
“Between Dennis, Josh, Smart, Rob, we got a chance to be really good defensively,” Brown said. “We just gotta continue to build that defensive communication and awareness with each other and I think we can really do some damage. Especially if we’re playing at that pace that we want to play at. I look forward to that side of the ball this year, so I’m ready to get out there.”
OTHER PRACTICE NOTES
PLAYING FAST
Brown thrives in the open court, so the Celtics drop-off defensively last season robbed him of easy opportunities. And while he thrived in half court situations, that’s become a new, necessary element to his game, not necessarily a preferred one.
“Today was fun because, I’ve been saying it for years, I want to play fast,” he said. “And I think we got the personnel to do so. We got bigs who can run, we got guards who love to get up and down the court. To me, that’s music to my ears. Today the pace was an emphasis.”
Pace is often construed as fast-break basketball, but pace also applies to the half court. Udoka saw wild success in San Antonio’s “.5” philosophy of making quick decisions. Brown and Tatum will need to push the pace in half court sets by trusting teammates to get the ball back to them rather than stand at the 3-point line killing ants.
The Celtics can be a much better team than last year simply by exerting some more effort defensively and getting more transition opportunities and then getting the ball popping more on offense.
That’s not some accumulated basketball knowledge passed down from a long-bearded sage on a mountain top. This isn’t some masterful epiphany that earns me a moment of smugness. That’s just trying harder. Now, maybe COVID and the condensed schedule and short turnaround made trying harder, harder, but those excuses are gone now.
Pace and defense are about effort. That’s all. From there, Udoka and the Celtics can add schemes and plans to maximize the results of that effort, but those schemes go nowhere without it.
ROMEO LANGFORD HOPING FOR AN OPPORTUNITY
Langford is at risk of falling victim to a numbers game this season. The addition of a few proven veterans means Langford is going to have to stand out to get an opportunity.
“The depth chart and my spot, that's stuff is going to come, not too focused on that,” he said Wednesday. “Just let the play do the talking and whoever coach decides, he decides.”
It’s a healthy attitude that can easily get mistaken for being blasé. Langford can easily fall into a spiral if he puts too much pressure on himself, which would certainly eliminate any chance he has at regular playing time.
"My mindset is just to keep being better,” he said. “Keep being better as a team through training camp and then whenever the season starts, the regular season starts. Whatever my role is, whatever coach calls upon I'm ready to do that."
That role could come in Maine.
“I came from an organization that might have been one of the best at using the G League in San Antonio,” Udoka said on media day. “You go across the board and look at guys as far back a Cory Joseph, Kyle Anderson, Dejounte Murray, Derrick White, we really would block out a certain amount of time for those guys to go down there and get actual practice and game reps and so if that’s not happening with us in Boston, we obviously want to get them on the court, and there’s no more realistic way to get them reps then getting them out there playing so it’s a big, huge benefit.”
Langford is still in the mix for a rotation spot, but those are limited. The brief glimpse the media got at the end of practice saw Langford on the same team as Tatum, Enes Kanter, and Dennis Schröder in a scrimmage, so he’ll get plenty of opportunity to earn a spot.
If he doesn’t then the Celtics will have to make a decision on how to give him the best chance to continue developing. Some see Maine as a demotion, but for players like Langford, it could be a necessary way to hammer home objectives and fundamentals while staying in game shape.
