This morning Steve Bulpett includes the following in his column:
At the end of the first quarter, Paul Pierce tried to loudly rouse the troops.
“It’s just focus,” he said. “That’s all it is. C’mon, this is the difference between us winning at home and on the road.”
Pierce’s attempts at motivation were noble, but they were of no use. The Celtics were sleepwalking in Memphis. For their lack of effort, they earned a 93-76 loss to the Grizzlies and an even steeper incline in their playoff climb with three games still left on the current road trip. That they would come out so poorly in such an important game was more disturbing than disappointing.
“Especially on the road with so much at stake for us at the end of the season,” Pierce said. “I don’t know what it was. Just poor execution on our part. We seemed like we just didn’t know what to do.”
“We were trying to follow our schemes,” Raef LaFrentz said. “We left Tsakalidis alone. That was a little bit by design, but it came back to bite us in the butt.”
The Celtics, meanwhile, could find no stride at all. Their lack of ball movement was in striking contrast to the pattern they’ve been setting.
“It seemed like they really had us scouted well,” Pierce said. “They knew all our plays.”
Which is more than he could say for his own team. At one point in the second half, Pierce came out of the game and informed Rivers that three Celts knew the play and two didn’t.
Hello.
Not to make a big deal out of this, but that sure reads like Pierce and LaFrentz are indirectly taking shots at Perkins and Jefferson through the papers. And while I’m not sure I mind them doing it, I believe it marks a first during their careers in Boston.
Jefferson especially has been anointed the future of the franchise since his great summer league showing a year and a half ago. In a move they may now regret the franchise spent his first year in Boston trumpeting his potential. There’s little question that his play since then has fallen well short of expectations.
The troubling thing is that so many of his flaws suggest a potential lack of motivation. After playing 126 games and more than 2000 minutes of professional basketball he continues to struggle with the kind of simple defensive rotations that college sophomores his age make routinely. His ability to quickly make the appropriate passes out of double-teams remains well behind that of Perkins, who has played less at the same age. The results of last off season’s conditioning work were uninspiring, at best. He showed the requisite skill and motivation to put together a great playoff series last year against Jermaine O’Neal and Indiana only to sleepwalk through much of the summer league and fall. He appears to very visibly dislike playing with any pain or aggravation. I could go on.
Jefferson received almost no coaching in high school, as his coach admitted in multiple interviews around draft time. He had never been sent to the weight room, forced to learn many plays, or taught any kind of team defense. He put up ungodly stats in high school playing against central Mississippi kids a foot or two smaller than him. It’s not clear that before he arrived at the Celtics he had ever worked hard at basketball in his life.
I’ll admit to worrying now that the Celtics may have erred in heaping such praise on him and his talent at the beginning. Where internal motivation may be lacking the team may now be belatedly realizing that he needs more of a kick in the ass than he’s been given. Doc has been preaching all season that players need to earn their time on the court with good play. Pierce and LaFrentz may now be turning up the pressure on the kids to get it together and play like pros.
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