Your Morning Dump... Where Stevens and IT are a perfect match

Every morning, we compile the links of the day and dump them here… highlighting the big story line. Because there’s nothing quite as satisfying as a good morning dump.

No wonder Thomas is happy. No player can ask for more than a coach who understands how to use him.

“Everybody that comes through, we’re not looking at what they can’t do, we look at what they can,” said Stevens. “They’re in the NBA for a reason. You soar with their strengths and go from there. He brought something to our team that we didn’t have with the ability to get into the paint with the ball, play pick-and-roll.

“Once we got more time together with regard to the system and everything else, you realize he can do a lot of stuff as a two off of the ball, even though he’s small,” he said. “He just does so many things well, and we choose to focus on that.”

This approach has not only been a hallmark of Stevens’ time with the Celtics. It has marked his entire coaching career, dating back to when he got the most out of a Butler University lineup that may not have featured as much talent as the much larger majors in Div. 1, but invariably had players who out-worked their competition.

Boston Herald

I was really excited when the Celtics hired Stevens. It was such an outside-the-box move, and yet, if you had to pick a college coach that had an approach to the game that would translate best to the NBA, you’d be hard pressed to find someone better than Stevens. His calm demeanor (celebratory NCAA tournament locker room GIF not withstanding), his professionalism and his ability to put players in a position to succeed are perhaps even more valuable in the NBA than they were in college.

In his first year, we all thought that Jordan Crawford player-of-the-week award was the best example of Stevens’ ability to get the most from his players. Then there was the way he turned ET into a legit 6th man of the year candidate and we thought we’d seen it all. Now you’ve got IT putting up legit MVP numbers for the #2 team in the Eastern Conference. What’s next?

Page 2: Where the Celtics are getting better on defense

After spending several months toiling with a defensive ranking in the bottom third of the league, the Celtics have climbed thanks to this recent surge in which they won 7 of 8 games. During this stretch Boston had the league’s eighth-ranked defense, with a rating of 103.2. This promising flurry has moved them up to No. 17 for the season.

“The difference between the 21st team defensively and the 10th-ranked team is not very much when you talk about stops per game,” Stevens said. “So we just have to work to get another stop per game right now, another stop per half. If we can do that, we’ll get better. We’ve played better defense for longer stretches in the last couple of weeks than we have. So we’re making progress in that regard.”

Boston Globe

There’s a couple solid points in this article, one worth taking note of is that there is not a huge statistical difference between bad teams and good teams in the NBA in a lot of areas (there’s a pretty big difference between awful and great, though). As the Celtics found out on Wednesday, a lousy team that is missing its best player still has enough talent on it to take a good team to the woodshed if they’re not paying attention.

Page 3: Where Ainge says nobody’s gotten serious about trades

“This time of year, nobody really has given their real price or what they will give you for the assets we have,” Danny Ainge, Boston’s president of basketball operations said during his weekly conversation on 98.5 The Sports Hub’s Toucher & Rich show. “So we will wait and see.”

CSNNE

This is the problem other teams have when they call Ainge up. Teams continue to negotiate anonymously through the media with Ainge, and here you have Ainge basically saying that he will out wait you, and he’s saying that on the record, to the media, with the full support of the ownership group. In short, you can’t turn the screws on the Celtics. If you want something from the Celtics, you’ll meet Danny’s price. Has it cost the Celtics a couple of good players? Perhaps. But the overall track record is pretty solid. As frequent Celtics fan baiter Matt Moore has observed, the Celtics “flat-out do not lose trades.”

Finally: Where the Knicks hope Oakley gets some help soon

By the time Oakley was removed from the Garden, the Knicks had already issued a classless press release saying “we hope he gets some help soon.” The Knicks are champions of spin, that’s for sure.

New York Daily News

As Charles Oakley was wrestling with Jim Dolan’s security team and being dragged out of Madison Square Garden, the future of the Knicks stood at the free throw line with a look of disbelief on his face.

Innocence lost best describes Kristaps Porzingis as all hell was breaking loose on Wednesday near the Knicks bench and Dolan’s team was reclaiming its well-earned place as the biggest laughingstock in pro sports.

What was the second-year forward possibly thinking?

For weeks, Porzingis has watched Phil Jackson’s mean-spirited attempt to pick a public fight with the Knicks’ best player, Carmelo Anthony. And now, in this surreal moment during the first quarter of a loss to the Los Angeles Clippers, Porzingis was witnessing another kind of fight with one of the most beloved players in franchise history.

New York Daily News

Yes. The Knicks really absolutely definitely released a statement in the MIDDLE of an NBA game saying that they hoped that Charles Oakley “get some help soon.”

Just going to leave this out there by way of contrast:

https://twitter.com/nba/status/828326164867354624