BOSTON – Having dropped three in a row, you had to figure that Boston Celtics head coach Brad Stevens would shake up things a bit.
He did just that by announcing the starting five would include rookie Jaylen Brown and veteran big Jonas Jerebko. Joining them with the first unit will be Isaiah Thomas, Jae Crowder and Al Horford.
“We started Jonas last time against Houston,” Stevens said. “They’re a very unique team to play with the way they spread the floor with all skilled guys.”
Stevens left clues that a change of this sort might come when Johnson played just four minutes against the Wizards last night, and Stevens explained afterwards that he did so to try and force Washington big man Marcin Gortat to have to defend further away from the basket.
With Horford and Jerebko playing the two big positions, Houston will have no choice but to respect their perimeter games which may help the Celtics do a better job of rebounding.
And before the question was asked, Stevens made it clear that Smart’s return to the bench had nothing to do with the screaming match Smart got into with the team’s assistant coaches near the end of last night’s loss at Washington.
“We’re going to start differently tonight because I want to start differently,” Stevens said. “Ultimately, we (Smart and Stevens) had a lot of talk today and we’ll continue that discussion but at the end of the day we’ll handle what we need to handle in an internal way. And I do think that, Marcus’ greatest strength is he’s very willful. He is very competitive. He wants to do really well and it eats at him when it doesn’t go his way.”
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Stevens added, “You can’t cross that line. He knew it. You guys saw what he wrote, and what he said. He was like that when I got in the locker room (following the Washington loss). Sometimes it just takes a minute to gather yourself and then, recognize you could have handled things differently.”