With the regular season kicking off in less than two weeks, the Boston Celtics are doing their best to balance getting their core guys ready while not risking overdoing it and thus increase the chance of injury.
Some teams like the Cleveland Cavaliers and Dallas Mavericks have left key players at home when they travel to certain road games during the preseason.
Celtics head coach Brad Stevens hasn’t done anything like that, but he too has taken measures to best ensure that he has a full complement of players in the season opener at the TD Garden on Oct. 26 against Brooklyn.
"Our goal on October 26 is to be ready to play a regular season game and play regular season minutes,” Stevens said. “And also play 82 games. There’s a fine line there.”
And to Stevens' credit, he's doing his part to balance when to push his players and when to pull back some.
There have been times during the preseason when Stevens has a had a hard practice right before a game.
On Friday, Stevens said he cut back significantly the practice time for his older players which included some review without any contact.
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Afterwards, some of those players played some one-on-one afterwards.
“That’s a good sign, the energy … you’re in pretty good shape,” Stevens said. “I feel good about the conditioning of our players. We’ve monitored that closely. It’s been a good hard week of work.”