BOSTON – The Boston Celtics are two days into the most unique training camp in the history of their franchise.
Full-team workouts began Friday, just 19 days before the team’s first regular-season game is scheduled to be played. The brief period between those two dates, coupled with a condensed draft and free-agency period, has in essence eliminated preparation for training camp. These players are learning the system and each other in real time.
“This is really the first few days together,” Brad Stevens said following Saturday’s practice, Boston’s second of the season. “We’ll proceed at the right pace. We’re balancing that newness with the need to get prepped quickly.”
Attempting to balance, that is. Doing so is an inexact science, as Stevens has quickly learned over the past two days.
“I’ve seen Jeff Teague look over at me a couple of times like, ‘What’s that?’” Stevens said of the veteran point guard, who joined Boston this week as a free agent. “Because you’re calling things that you’ve done before, really on the fly, right?”
Right. And that’s just fine for Boston’s 13 returning players, but for the four who just joined the team within the last two-plus weeks, this training camp is nothing short of a crash course for the season.
Teague and Thompson, Boston’s two free-agent acquisitions, just signed their contracts Monday afternoon – one day before practice facilities around the league opened for the official ‘start’ of the NBA season. For perspective, free-agent signings typically occur at the start of July, giving players about three months to learn their new team’s playbook and schemes before camp begins.
A similar timeline is normally afforded to rookies, along with the ability to participate in Summer League following a late-June Draft. However, Boston’s rookies, Aaron Nesmith and Payton Pritchard, were drafted Nov. 17 – only two weeks before the practice facility opened – and they had no Summer League experience to help them along.
That lack of preparation time and experience has put the newcomers behind the proverbial eight-ball for the start of their first camp with their new team.
“It’s definitely a challenge,” Grant Williams, who is entering his second season, acknowledged. “I think it’s something every team is going to face – establishing a whole new playbook for guys who were on different teams.”
Two of Boston’s newcomers, Teague and Tristan Thompson, are learning the playbook in very different ways.
Teague has been thrown into the fire at the start of camp. He is stepping in as the starting point guard while Kemba Walker recovers from an offseason procedure on his left knee. As such, Teague is almost certainly getting most, if not all, of the first-team reps at point guard.
Thompson, meanwhile, is sidelined with a minor hamstring strain, so he is learning through his eyes and ears on the sideline.
Williams did comment that both Teague and Thompson are “very intelligent guys,” so that is helping their cause as they learn Boston’s system on the fly.
Nesmith and Pritchard have also received positive feedback on how they’ve handled the start of camp. Stevens said that they are “sharp guys” who he thinks will “adjust as quickly as possible.”
Pritchard said Saturday that while this process has been challenging for him, he’s relying on his experience and work ethic to push him through the adversity.
“It’s definitely difficult, because you’ve got to come in, you’ve got to learn the playbook right away, you’ve got to learn the defensive schemes,” he said. “But for me, experiencing what I went through in college and picking up things like that (helped me).”
He continued, “I just try to pick up things right away. Tried to get the playbook down before practice started, defensive schemes and all that. So I kinda had my mind wrapped around it before I even started.”
Pritchard might think his mind is wrapped around the playbook, but that might change once games arrive. As Stevens pointed out, playing in a live NBA game is another animal compared to working out during Day 2 of training camp.
“I’ve been impressed in the first couple of days of work with our guys,” Stevens said of the rookies, “but it’s a whole different thing once you get to the regular season.”
Which, we’ll remind you, is coming at the Celtics faster than it ever has before.
This schedule isn’t going to slow down for anyone. Training camp opened Friday. A preseason game looms 10 days from now. A regular-season game looms 18 days from now.
The crash course is officially on.
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December 06, 2020 at 09:11AM
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Crash Course Is On For C's As They Manage Unusual Camp Circumstances - Celtics.com
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