NBA EASTERN CONFERENCE FINALS: CELTICS VS. HEAT

September 17, 2020

Brad Stevens

Boston Celtics

Game 2: Postgame

Miami Heat 106, Boston Celtics 101

Q. Can you just walk us through what happened in there?

BRAD STEVENS: Guys were emotional after a hard game, hard loss.

Q. What happened in the third quarter?

BRAD STEVENS: We pulled apart and we didn't play well. They did a good job. We're not beating this team if we're not completely connected on both ends of the court. Got to get back to being that, which we've been at times.

Right now, they're a better team. We're going to have to fight to get back into this series.

Q. Was it a similar thing that happened down the stretch after you got back up five late in the fourth?

BRAD STEVENS: I thought once we did that, we were really playing pretty well. Dragic hit the two hard contested shots over Theis, one at the very end of the shot clock where he threw it in. The turnovers obviously hurt.

We did a lot of good things in the last seven minutes. We just shot ourselves in the foot in the third.

Q. You seemed to play pretty well against their zone in Game 1, but trouble in the second half. What needs to improve there? Something that they're doing?

BRAD STEVENS: It's a hard zone to play against. We did play well against it in Game 1. We played with way better pace than we did tonight. So we'll go back and look at it, figure out if it was a technical thing or a pace thing or an execution thing or just not-as-focused-on-the-important-stuff thing.

Q. We saw when Grant was in there late, he was screening, rolling to fill that open spot in the middle. Did you want the offense to stick with that or did you want your perimeter guys to have more room to attack down the middle?

BRAD STEVENS: Well, if you pop against the zone, you're popping into the defense. So you have to present a threat at the rim and make the guy in the middle play multiple guys, shrink the bottom in.

I thought we did a good job attacking to the corners on several occasions. We missed shots or we drove it, dumped it to the roller and he just missed. But Adebayo had a big part of that.

This isn't about zones or defenses and offenses and stuff like that. This is, we just got to be better.

Q. Are you going to have to do some cleaning up tomorrow? Sounded like a lot of screaming, things being thrown. Definite frustration in there. Are you going to have to give guys the day off or have another meeting, figure some things out?

BRAD STEVENS: Oh, of course. We do that after every game.

Q. You only played Kemba just about 34 minutes. You didn't get him in the fourth quarter until seven or eight minutes to go. Was that a response to his struggles late in the past few games?

BRAD STEVENS: I wanted to try to give him as much opportunity to play fresh at the end as possible.