The Boston Celtics (5-2) remain on the road to success. Against the San Antonio Spurs (4-3) the team won by a strong Kyrie Irving scored a clear 108:94 victory. Daniel Theis also had his moments.
Celtics coach Brad Stevens didn’t change his starting five for once, which also meant that Daniel Theis had to leave the bank against Miami. Meanwhile, the Spurs played back-to-back, which is why Manu Ginobili took a break.
The Spurs didn’t show any signs of tired legs – they had no problems to keep up the pace with the Celtics and hit hard in front. At the beginning of the second quarter in particular, they took advantage of a weak phase for the hosts and took the lead for the first time in a semi-comfortable manner (31:37) through several threesomes and an 11:0 run. However, this didn’t last very long – also because Theis was there with strong back-to-back dunks. Kyrie Irving also won several times and defeated the Spurs-Defense, which is why the lead belonged to the goblins (54:49).
San Antonio came out of the cabin very slowly, which Celtics used efficiently and extended the lead to 13 points. Irving in particular accelerated the pace, which led to simple points. However, the spurs caught themselves in the course of the round and could not be shaken off thanks to an intermediate run, so that no decision was made at the start of the fourth quarter (80:67).
However, the Spurs were now particularly noticeable in the transition that they played their second away game in two days, so Boston moved ahead to 19 points in just a few minutes thanks to a strong impact from Terry Rozier. Gregg Popovich’s team did not recover from this.
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Best man on the field was Kyrie Irving with 24 points (10/16 FG) and 6 assists, Jaylen Brown scored 18 points. Daniel Theis used his 14 minutes (6 points, 6 rebounds, 1 block) and provided one or two highlights. Top scorer of the Spurs was Brandon Paul with 18 points, Rudy Gay played 14. The Bigs Pau Gasol and LaMarcus Aldridge remained inconspicuous with 11 points each.
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Kyrie Irving. He was practically unstoppable with his drives and came to the zone whenever he felt like it. There he found the balance between (high percentage!) own deals and offshoots on the bigs, from which Theis also benefited. In addition, he pushed up the tempo in the right moments without forcing fast breaks.
Kyle Anderson. A used day for the starter on two. The fact that he is not someone who creates litters should be clear – so it is all the more important that he meets catch-and-shoot deals or cuts. However, he was not able to do this (xx FG). He also defended the pick-and-roll weakly.
Brad Stevens – who celebrated his first victory as coach over the Spurs – certainly studied his opponent’s game the day before in Indiana. San Antonio already had problems with the opponent’s pick-and-roll, so Boston launched almost every half-field attack with one. The Bigs Aldridge and Gasol weren’t on their feet fast enough, which just punished Irving. Especially the post-game was able to neglect the Celtics and also the threesome (see above) fell out of the blocks after a kickout-pass.