Brad Stevens is learning and growing, but he won’t tell you how

https://www.masslive.com/celtics/2019/10/boston-celtics-coach-brad-stevens-is-learning-and-growing-but-he-wont-tell-you-how.html




Boston Celtics coach Brad Stevens is learning and growing, but he won’t tell you how




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Boston Celtics head coach Brad Stevens watches from the balcony at the team's training facility in Boston, Monday, July 1, 2019. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)


By John Karalis | JKaralis@masslive.com



BOSTON -- This is a story about Brad Stevens.

Brad Stevens hates these.

“If this is about me I have no interest in it.”

Building a good basketball team is like making a fine watch. It takes a lot of pieces working in unison to get it working perfectly, and if any one of those gears isn’t turning just right, the whole thing is off.

As much as Stevens wants the focus on the players on the floor, coaching is a gear that helps make this thing tick. Last year, by his own admission, it was out of sync.

He sat on a riser at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee and said “I think I did a bad job.” He said “if your team doesn’t find its best fit together that’s on you,” and promised a deep dive into how he could be better.

Now we want to know, but he’s not telling us. That doesn’t mean we can’t read between the lines.

“This is my fourth year playing for Brad and probably every year has been similar except for last year in terms of the approach,” Jaylen Brown told MassLive. “We weren’t bad last year. I think everybody blows it out of proportion, but we definitely could have been a lot better, so it’s just getting back to what we -- what I came into pretty much since my rookie year. That defensive mindset, moving the ball, playing together.”

Getting back to what they always did. Defense. Moving. Together. They’re getting back to doing those things.

“I just think all that I’ve always thought and believed about the game has just been reinforced,” Brad Stevens said on media day when asked about the lessons of last year.

He has a philosophy. He thinks basketball is best when it’s played a certain way and the Celtics didn’t play that way last season. Now his beliefs are being reinforced.

Stevens will never say it, but there’s no doubt that navigating the Kyrie Irving situation played a part in this. Irving said more than he knew when he said “he’s never coached any player like me” back in March. Between catering to a star player with varying degrees of commitment and trying to deliver on the promise of expectations, compromises were made.

“I definitely think, for Brad, last year was his first year ever going through anything like that and really helpless in a way where nobody really knew what to do,” Marcus Smart told MassLive. “So, he’s learned, just like we learned as players. He’s a young coach, he’s a great coach, but still, like anybody else, we still have room for improvement.”

Stevens biggest adjustment at the moment seems to be fostering that “togetherness” everyone keeps talking about.

“I think it gave us a good chance to look at some of our opportunities to create more community work,” Stevens said while emphasizing how players are doing most things in groups. “I think there’s a balance there that you have to give the individual and personal attention that’s necessary, but then you also have to grow as a team.”

On top of a return to his philosophical roots, Stevens and his staff have been forced to adjust from past years and come up with some new wrinkles to accommodate new players with new skills.


“You can definitely see that he’s been working on it and just trying to find ways to come up with different solutions for us to succeed on the court,” Smart said. “As a player you want your coach to be that type where he’s just as determined as you are as a player to go out and get the work in for himself.”

“I haven’t gone through a game yet where I feel like I coached it perfectly,” Stevens said. “I think that’s one of the beautiful things about coaching in basketball. There’s seasons and games, you got a lot to learn, you got a lot to grow from. Last year was one. Two years ago was one. Three years ago was one… You have to be honest with yourself and say these are the five or six things I would have done different if I were faced with that again, and these are the two or three things I feel really good about and we’ll do it again.”

The season may slowly unveil the elusive specifics. Right now we just know Stevens has learned things. He’s not letting us in on much else.

“I think Brad is really humble about his approach,” Brown said. “He’s made some mistakes, he’s acknowledged that. We all did. We learned and grow as a group.”

Growth is maybe most important to Stevens. No one likes to fail, but Stevens seems to enjoy, at least on some level, the process of winning and losing. Failing, like Stevens did last year, is inevitable, but a new season gives him a new chance to flip that into something positive.


“It’d be silly of me to say to our players or to anyone else that the growth mindset has been one of my most important motivators and not try to live it,” he said. “It’s been fun to spend that time in the offseason doing basketball and different things to try and do that.”



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