The Boston Celtics followed their emotional Christmas Day win over the Philadelphia 76ers with a dud Thursday night against the Houston Rockets.
The James Harden show overshadowed another lackluster effort from the Celtics, especially the Boston bench, as the C’s opened a three-game road trip on the wrong foot.
Kyrie Irving, who traded figurative jabs with Harden in the third quarter (although Harden outscored him 45-23 for the game), lobbed some verbal jabs at his teammates after the game.
Rather, Irving felt the need to remind his teammates that just because they have a roster of very good players doesn’t mean they’ll automatically be a very good team.
“Yeah, we have the talent, but it’s not enough in this league. It’s not enough,” Irving told reporters after the game. “For us, it’s just about making sure we’re doing the little things. I was talking to a couple of our guys, a couple of our veterans, just making sure we stay on our young guys as well as us and having the responsibility of doing the little things — boxing out, limiting those guys to one shot per possession.
“They’re a great team, but if you limit them to one shot, those long rebounds, those leakouts, those little things they did to allow them to score 120-plus points. You take away some of those things, and the game becomes a lot harder for them. The game became hard for them, but it’s just maintaining that and being able to sustain that for the game.”
Irving obviously isn’t wrong, and some of the Celtics’ issues aren’t entirely surprising. From a tactical standpoint, Boston not having Aron Baynes obviously hurts on the glass, where Houston outrebounded the Celtics 54-38 on Thursday night.
But Boston does need better buy-in from a lot of its players, and that might be part of the ongoing growing plans as the star-heavy club learns to accept lesser roles. Once you get that buy-in, it usually becomes a lot easier to do the little things.
It’s hard to say whether Boston ever will find the right combination with this group of players, but losses like Thursday night prove the Celtics still have plenty of work to do.
