NEW YORK — The Celtics started a fresh win streak last night — an important accomplishment when other teams near the top of the Eastern Conference are improving — and Kyrie Irving believes it’s time for the blinders.
“It’s about us right now. That’s where that stands. We just want to find that consistency,” Irving said. “And then we keep hammering on it because we want to have carryover from game to game, understanding what we can improve on individually and as a team, and just going out there and executing.”
As the Celtics discovered in the five games leading into the All-Star break, execution can be a challenge. And, it was often beyond them.
Last night’s 121-112 win over the New York Knicks at the Madison Square Garden helped drive home that point. This was not a simple win.
Trey Burke, a journeyman guard who has been doing nice things lately for New York, produced 26 points for a second straight game. It was enough to knock the Celtics back on their heels.
“We did OK in a lot of areas. We made some mistakes,” said a somewhat unimpressed C’s coach Brad Stevens. “We’ve got to play a little bit cleaner probably, but obviously on the second night of a back-to-back, I thought the energy and competitive spirit was great, all 96 minutes that we played this weekend.”
Irving had 28 points and Jaylen Brown scored 24 as the Celtics finally had enough finishing kick to put distance on the Knicks.
Marcus Smart filled in the gaps for a second straight game with the return of his game-changing assortment of hustle plays. He seems to have come back from a 12-game absence with a hot hand, scoring 11 points on 4-of-5 shooting and making five assists.
He shot 9-of-14 combined against the Knicks and Pistons in back-to-back games, both wins. Remarkably, he didn’t attempt a 3-pointer and again knocked his own team into shape defensively.
“It’s just the appreciation of Marcus Smart there,” said Irving. “Just implementing him, and him just putting his stamp and identity on our team as well, it just makes a lot of other guys’ jobs a lot easier because he covers up a lot of our mistakes as well as playing with unbelievable awareness on both ends of the floor. He understands spacing. He understands the little things that matter in putting a full 48-minute game together.”
Similar, in other words, to what Irving does for the Celtics on offensive, where they often need their star to take charge.
Irving smacked the Knicks with 15 points on 5-for-6 shooting in the third quarter, including 4-for-4 from downtown. He was ultimately 6-for-12 from 3-point range, and locked into an improbable scoring duel with Burke.
“Just having an aggressive mindset, playing with a great pace, making sure our guys were in the right spots, understanding that they were going to try to make a push,” said Irving. “But we had primary control of the game because of the way we wanted to play offensively and defensively.
“So we just had to limit some of their easy opportunities. But Trey Burke was doing an unbelievable job of keeping them in the game as well as (Michael) Beasley, as well as the extra effort plays that they were making. So we just wanted to limit that and I felt like we put ourselves in a great position.”
Stevens has to admit sometimes the safest choice is to simply follow the lead of his All-Star point guard.
“There’s no question,” he said. “(Have to) pick spots appropriately. That’s hard to do for 48 straight minutes. It’s hard to have the ball like that, expending energy with the ball like that. But yeah, for sure. I think our team has gotten better at seeing when to stay spaced, when to set screens, those types of things.
“And also recognizing when (Irving) needs to be off of it just to get a breather, which, at the end of the game, I thought Smart being in there on a couple of those driving plays, it’s good to have another ball-handler there with him that can take some of the pressure off of him.”