Kevin Garnett said he couldn’t repeat what Doc Rivers said to the team during a Friday film session.
It’s probably exactly what every Celtics fan was saying last night as they watched the Lakers punch their team in the mouth, what they said when Pau Gasol grabbed another offensive rebound, what they said as the Lakers held a layup parade.
“Doc reminded us of a lot of things in film,” Kendrick Perkins said, trying to clean up Rivers’ language. “He said we came out too casual. He said that we had to win games and this wasn’t a vacation... He also said we played soft last night.”
So what can we expect the “soft” Celtics to do in Game 2? Besides not treat the game like a trip to Disneyland?
First and foremost -- take back the paint. On defense that means better rotations and challenging shooters. The Celtics need to get some easy transition baskets against the Lakers, and that starts with defense, Rajon Rondo said they were reminded.
“It’s not hard to keep me out of transition if we’re taking the ball out of the basket everytime,” Rondo said.
But most of the talk was about the Celtics big men going back to being the aggressors. On both ends of the floor. The Celtics needs some offense from down low.
They need the old Kevin Garnett back. Gasol said today he thought Garnett may have lost some explosiveness since two years ago, but the Celtics were not buying that.
“In this series, (Garnett) needs to get back to demanding the ball on the block, Perkins said. “I think we got to get back to where KG is taking 20 shots a game like he did in the Cleveland series in order for us to win. We’ve got to get back to attack mode.
“Getting off of KG, I think we settled a little but too much last night, we didn’t attack. But we got to find a way to post KG a little more. Him and Rasheed. They got to want to post, they’ve got t ask for the ball. That is one of the adjustments I think we’re going to make.”