Warriors’ biggest championship threat might be Boston’s Brad Stevens

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Warriors’ biggest championship threat might be Boston’s Brad Stevens






By Connor Letourneau
 
Updated 9:41 pm, Friday, January 26, 2018



Photo: Maddie Meyer / Getty Images





Brad Stevens has led the Celtics to the the top of the Eastern Conference, and to a win over the Warriors in Boston earlier this season. Boston visits Oracle Arena on Saturday.

In April 2011, while calling the Final Four in Houston for CBS, Steve Kerr became enamored with the then-34-year-old head coach who had guided Butler — a Horizon League team — to its second straight national championship game.

“I was immediately impacted by how smart he was,” Kerr said of Brad Stevens, whose Boston team faces Kerr’s Warriors on Saturday evening at Oracle Arena. “Obviously, to get Butler to the Final Four in back-to-back years is amazing.”

Long a master at maximizing the potential of unheralded rosters, Stevens is in unfamiliar territory this season. The Celtics, at 35-14, are the class of the Eastern Conference. With talented personnel who value both sides of the ball and keep the drama to a minimum, Boston has as good a shot as any East team of reaching the NBA Finals.

More than Kyrie Irving, whose offseason addition helped vault the Celtics to the top of the East hierarchy, Stevens is the biggest reason Boston could push the Western Conference winners in June. Like Kerr, Stevens is the rare coach who pairs elite X’s and O’s with an uncanny ability to relate to his players.


In the annual NBA.com poll of general managers, Stevens, Kerr and Spurs head coach Gregg Popovich are the only coaches to consistently receive votes for having the best offense, the best defense and the best in-game adjustments. All three of those men are defined by humility, a dry wit and an unyielding desire to improve.

“They’re all very comfortable in their own skin,” said Golden State assistant coach Ron Adams, who was on the Celtics’ staff for Stevens’ first season in 2013-14. “They’re humble, and they don’t fool themselves about the nature of success. They’re all really good coaches, but they know they have to have really good players to win. They keep perspective.”

After leaving Butler in July 2013 to become Boston’s head coach, Stevens hired Adams — one of the league’s defensive gurus — to help him rebuild the team after Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce were traded to Brooklyn. It amazed Adams how, within the span of months, a coach with no previous NBA experience had adapted his playbook and style to excel long-term at the sport’s highest level.
In Stevens’ second season, the Celtics won 40 games — a 15-win improvement from the previous year — and improbably earned the No. 7 seed in the Eastern Conference playoffs. Stevens, an old-school coach despite his infatuation with analytics, had fostered a joyful locker-room culture, made shrewd late-game adjustments and tweaked his offense mid-season to accommodate the addition of high-scoring guard Isaiah Thomas.

By following a blueprint Kerr knows well (stingy defense and movement-heavy offense), Boston overcame obvious roster flaws to reach the Eastern Conference finals last May. Now, more than halfway through his fifth NBA season, Stevens has the Celtics atop the East standings sooner than many expected.

Only five months after a roster overhaul that included the loss of defensive standouts Jae Crowder and Avery Bradley, Boston has the league’s best defensive rating. Irving, finally the unquestioned leader after three seasons with LeBron James in Cleveland, is an MVP candidate. Though they’ve dropped four of their past five games, the Celtics, who beat Golden State on Nov. 16 in Boston, are a case study in stability compared to the soap opera unfolding in the Cavaliers’ locker room.

“He’s obviously very, very bright,” Kerr said of Stevens. “Not only in terms of X’s and O’s, but also in his demeanor, the way he handles players, the way he communicates. He’s very poised and smart and seems to set a really good tone, which is reflected in the way his players play.”

A year after first meeting Kerr at the Final Four in Houston, Stevens asked Kerr to grab dinner in Indianapolis. Stevens peppered Kerr, who was in town to call the Big Ten Tournament, with questions about the NBA.

It was the start of a friendship built on mutual respect. During the Las Vegas Summer League each July, Kerr and Stevens got lunch together. It has become relatively common for Stevens, who, like Kerr, is an avid reader of Malcolm Gladwell books, to text Kerr about matters greater than basketball.

“He’s a guy I always appreciated and picked his brain,” said Stevens, who knows he’ll likely need to beat his friend to achieve his ultimate goal. “He’s been a very good resource for me.”

Connor Letourneau is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: cletourneau@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @Con_CHron

Saturday’s game
Who: Celtics (35-14)
at Warriors (39-10)
When: 5:30 p.m.
TV/Radio: Channel: 7 Channel: 10/95.7
Quick turnaround
A look at Brad Stevens’ records over his first five seasons with the Boston Celtics:

Season	W	L	Playoffs
2013-14	25	57	None
2014-15	40	42	0-4
2015-16	48	34	2-4
2016-17	53	29	9-9*
2017-18	35	14	--

* Lost in five games to Cavaliers
in Eastern Conference finals



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