C's players enthusiastic about full court press

Jimmy Toscano
CSNNE.com Editor/Staff Writer

The Celtics led 79-53 midway through the third quarter last night, their biggest lead of the game. But it was how the C's got there that became a story.

The Celtics unleashed a tenacious full-court press against the Nets last night, of which they had no answer to on offense.

Rondo led the charge, and also put the plan in place during the game. The team followed from there, and we've seen enough of Avery Bradley to know that a press is nothing he can't handle.

"It caught me off guard but, you know, Rondo, he's the leader of our team, and he's the one who put us in it and it worked out for us," I think he's going to call it too tomorrow, most likely."

Bradley would certainly like that. He's been the one player on the Celtics to consistently press on defense, and was all smiles when talking about the effect it had on the Nets. He thinks that defensive gameplan is one the C's can use a lot.

"Definitely, if you notice … when we did it, they tried to do it to us," Bradley said. "If you guys notice that, they tried to do it right after we did it. Because it does work it gets teams down into their shot clock and they were starting their offense at like ten seconds."

"What makes it so tough, we're doing it after made baskets. So the team is kind of like, 'dang we just got scored on, now they're picking us up full-court.'"

The Nets' Deron Williams expressed frustration in not being able to break the press Friday night, but as Bradley points out, a lot of the Nets' issues were their own wrongdoings.

"The craziest thing about it is we weren't even really pressing them," Bradley said. "We kind of just showed it and let them make the bad passes."

It went a lot further than the guards though, as Bradley was quick to credit Mickael Pietrus for his defensive work, and laughed when thinking about Kevin Garnett's probable state of mind during it.

"I bet you he didn't even know what was going on at first," Bradley joked, "but we all kind of just smiled about it today and was just like, 'Dang, that does work.' And it's definitely something we will be doing every game or when Rondo thinks we should do it."

Celtics forward Chris Wilcox shared the enthusiasm for the press, echoing Bradley in the sense that forcing the opposition to play offense with a limited shot clock only helps the defense.

“I think it was great. We mixed it up went into a full-court press a little bit," Wilcox said. "I think that kind of changed the momentum of the game and that’s what we have to do night-in and night-out. We can’t just show them a man-to-man on one end of the floor. We got to throw some different things out there to teams because everybody can kind of pick their way through a man-to-man. But when you’re pressing them up the floor and give them 13 to 11 seconds to run their offense it kind of helps out our defense."

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I'd like to see the press against Houston Tuesday. Let's see if that keeps Lowry, Martin and Lee in check.

NY

I was surprised that they did not apply the press in the Knick game. As the article stated, everyone liked it and it had positive results. If so what gives.

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It's difficult to maintain an effective full court press against teams that have a good, aggressive ballhandler and/or players who can break away for easy touchdown passes. The Knicks have both.

Sam

I say give a try and try to break the rookie. It could also break their rhyme when the Knicks looked aggressive especially early in the 2nd quarter.

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