The Boston Celtics have made it very clear their priority is the postseason in this Disney- hosted season restart, and starting center Daniel Theis only added fuel to that fire after the team’s Friday morning shootaround session.
With how Boston has handled point guard Kemba Walker’s knee, coach Brad Stevens emphasizing the postseason readiness over seeding games, or veteran guard Marcus Smart explicitly saying the team is there to win a banner, the Celtics haven’t been at all secretive about their priorities in this restart.
We can now add the team’s master of the screen to that chorus as well.
“We have now three weeks … to prepare for [the playoffs]”, offered the German big man when asked how ready he was for longer minutes in the postseason.
“We had practices with scrimmages. I tried to get extra work in,” he added, “so it’s hard to copy like a real game, so we’ll see how far the conditioning goes tonight — but pretty much same thing.”
For what it’s worth, with two important players (guards Eric Bledsoe and Pat Connaughton) of their rotation out recovering from recent COVID-19 infections, it seems that’s the plan with the Bucks as well.
The Celtics, for once, find themselves with a totally clean bill of health.
“I’m happy about it,” explained Theis. “I don’t know how many guys who played with the full roster; probably less than 10 the whole season, so it’s going to be interesting.”
“Now we’ve got eight games to get everybody in playoff shape, and hopefully everybody [will] stay healthy and we’ve got to have a great push for [the] next eight games and then playoffs, so I’m just happy that we’ve got the whole team together now, so we can actually play our Celtics basketball.”
While both teams will likely go as hard as they have since the start of the exhibition scrimmage games last week, we may see moves (like minutes restrictions actually being enforced and unusual lineups) that are not obviously conducive to winning a regular season game.
And if that still seems puzzling, just take it from Theis (and Stevens and Smart) that the primary goal isn’t a win over Milwaukee in the regular season.
It’s winning four of seven in the Conference Finals — against the Bucks, or any other comers.
