Prior to Sunday's loss in Oklahoma City to the Thunder, the Celtics had won five straight games and were finally seeming to fully hit their stride after the season-ending injury to Rajon Rondo.
However, of those five wins, two were decided in overtime and all were decided by single-digits, something that Doc Rivers does not find a lot of joy in. The average margin of victory in those games has been 5.2 points per, which is probably much, much too close for the Celtics' — one of the league's older teams — liking.
From the Boston Globe's Baxter Holmes: "The habit we get into, to me, is when we get a lead, we want Paul to bring the ball up every time down," Rivers said. "And that's not what we want. We want to get the ball up the floor and the ball will find Paul.
It just seems like we get safe all of the sudden. We get the lead by being aggressive and then all of the sudden we get into these safe modes."
Doc is known for being a very serious and intense coach that expects the most from his players at all possible times, and he feels that when the Celtics get up big in games, they tend to let up a bit, which leads to these games ending up much closer than is probably necessary.
Having the ability to still go 100 percent when winning a game by a bunch of points is basically the opposite of human nature as we naturally tend to loss effort when we feel comfortable, like how a team puts in bench players in a blowout or an animal feels less stressed when a predator isn't present.
However, in the NBA, there comes a point when a team fighting for its playoff life — with older and more injury-prone players– has to cast aside that human tendency and learn how to play a full 48 minutes without letting up.
Now, I do not really know how Boston is to do that but the trade deadline addition of pure-scorer Jordan Crawford and recent 10-day deal signings of D.J. White and Shavlik Randolph provide some more healthy bodies for Doc Rivers to tinker with and use in lineups to see which work and which do not.
As they say, the more the merrier.
