All Brad Stevens wants for Christmas is a damn practice

We have talked a lot about the schedule lately. The Celtics are in the midst of an especially packed December slate which involves a lot of travel, not much rest, and zero time to actually practice.

And that’s not sitting well with Brad Stevens.

“It is what it is. There’s probably not a day I’m looking forward to more than Dec. 30, when we practice,” Stevens said before this morning’s shootaround in preparation for tonight’s game against the Pacers. “But we have to find our rhythm and find our groove through playing. We have to do it through these shootarounds, and we’re gonna be on the court for 40 minutes max, but it needs to be a good 40 minutes.

“That’s just where we are. The good news I will say about this is we’re gonna have a lot of information by the time January rolls around—who we are, what we’re capable of, what we need to tweak, what we need to change,” he said. “And sometimes it’s probably better to have that information before you make those changes on a hunch.”

Stevens has always used the first few months of the schedule to collect data and make second-half adjustments. He’ll head into this second half armed with more information than ever and hopefully determine which guys should and shouldn’t be playing together.

This, we hope will help fix glaring problems with the second unit and how to start second quarters.

Keep in mind, he’s also been limiting minutes for players in anticipation of this part of the schedule. It’s like setting the cruise control on 60 for a drive along a long stretch of highway that doesn’t have gas stations. It’s not going how we’d like, but it’s progressing in a positive direction, and it will probably change once we can fuel up.

Minutes will increase when there’s more downtime to recover. We’re nowhere close to seeing how a playoff rotation would look, so we should be prepared for some serious tweaks once we can flip the calendar.

For now, Brad can just mark the days like a cartoon character writing on a wall in his jail cell, pining for December 30th so he can be released from this NBA lockdown and feel the freedom of the practice court.