Boston Celtics Fully Prepared for London Game

The Boston Celtics should be the most prepared team in the NBA after this London trip

The Boston Celtics went into this season knowing that this London game was going to cause problems with their schedule. The team requested extra time off before and after the game to account for the transition, and that resulted in a deadly schedule to open the season.

Good news is that the Celtics escaped that awful stretch still hanging onto that number one seed, and now they get to enjoy some of the rewards of this mini break in the middle of the season. The Celtics have already announced that Al Horford is going to return, and Marcus Morris is going to be off his minutes restriction, making this the healthiest the Celtics have been since the first game.

The health and rest are the biggest reasons why the Celtics are so prepared for this London game. They feel great about their six game winning streak and you could not ask for a team to feel more fresh than they do right now. There really are no obstacles in the way of the Celtics right now, putting them in an ideal position to have a strong performance in London.

The other bonus is that Stevens has had all kinds of time to prepare, not only for this individual matchup, but for the final playoff push. The Celtics went a month without practice time, preventing Stevens from having the proper chance to implement adjustments. The Celtics struggled in a lot of ways during that stretch, but the worst part was their inability to fix those problems.

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Stevens now has had the extra time to make up for that, and he is going to have more time once the game in London is over. Stevens talked about how all he’s been doing during this trip is preparation, and he knows the Celtics are in an ideal position to go on a great run to gain some ground in the Eastern Conference race.

The Celtics still have a lot of things to figure out, and there are roles that are clearly not defined yet. Stevens has talked a lot about finding more ways to get Jayson Tatum involved, but there were not many opportunities to really figure out the best way to do that. With all this extra downtime, Stevens will certainly have more ways to get him involved, without threatening anything else the team has been doing well this season.

With all this time off, the Celtics really cannot afford to lose to the Philadelphia 76ers. The teams behind them will already have an opportunity to gain ground because of the extra games in hand. If the Celtics drop this one that top seed will be at serious risk once again. Stevens knows this and he will make sure the players will also take advantage of this rest, and handle the 76ers the way we know they should in London.

The Celtics can then finish this mini break on a seven game winning streak, in the best position possible to get that streak ever higher. The Celtics should be able to function better on both ends, and all the players should have a better idea of what they need to do to get this team to its best.

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It is always hard to tell exactly how this amount of time off will impact a team, but the Celtics knew they needed this. After the disaster that came from having no rest and no practice time, this team will never take that for granted again. They’ve all had an opportunity to understand how much they can gain from this time off, and if everyone uses it to their advantage then we should be seeing the best version of the Celtics this season, starting with the game in London.

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