This might have been the most excruciating series of basketball games I’ve ever watched. Seeing one of the Celtics’ most promising seasons in recent memory teeter on the verge of the abyss was absolute agony. Kind of like how 2020 has felt like an eternity, the last seven games against the defending champs felt like seven years of player development playing out. Here are some lessons we learned from seven games against the Toronto Raptors:
Player rotations are not static
For a while, I’ve been basically advocating for Brad Stevens to simply “play our better players” and “not play our other players” without putting enough thought into who should come off the bench and when.