AUERBACH CENTER, BRIGHTON – For the last time this season, the Celtics practiced at the Auerbach Center. Practice spanned a couple of hours, and crowd noise pumped through the facility in order to help emulate the feel of playing TD Garden.
Starting tomorrow, that’s where the Celtics will practice. Both the Celtics and the Mavericks will have a practice that is open to the media at TD Garden, and multiple players for each team will speak.
On Tuesday, only one Celtics player addressed reporters, but it was a highly-anticipated podium appearance: Kristaps Porzingis, who’s been out with a soleus strain suffered on April 29th, sat with a smile and provided a bit of insight on what his return to play has looked like, and what his mindset is entering the Finals.
We also heard from Joe Mazzulla, who reflected on Kristaps Porzingis’s looming return and addressed where the team’s mindset is at in the days ahead of the series starting.
Here’s what you need to know from today’s practice.
The journey to returning to action was lengthier than Kristaps Porzingis anticipated
Kristaps Porzingis confirmed earlier reports that the plan is for him to available for Game 1 of the Finals. It also sounds like his return to play was a little bit slow than initially anticipated; ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski had previously reported he could make his return as soon as Game 4 of the Conference Finals.
“As I said, it’s been long,” Porzingis said. “Maybe at first, everybody thought it was going to be quicker, but then it’s a little bit longer. So, it weighs on you.”
Porzingis said he’s been feeling better every day, and that he’s looking forward to getting on the floor, but stopped short of saying he felt 100% physically.
“I don’t know. We’ll see,” Porzingis said. “I have a couple more days, and I’ve done a lot of work up until this point, and I’ve done everything needed to get back into playing shape. We’ll see on the night.”
Asked about whether he’s running pain-free, he paused for about 10 seconds, smiled, and eventually offered: “Yes.”
Joe Mazzulla reflects on his biggest takeaways from the 2022 Finals
Joe Mazzulla couldn’t remember much about his mindset and approach heading into the NBA Finals in 2022, when he was an assistant on the Celtics.
“I didn’t really have a role in it because it wasn’t my scout,” Mazzulla said. “We just did things differently.”
As a second-year head coach, he certainly has a role to play now. But he doesn’t see it as substantially different from his role as the head coach during the regular season, when the Celtics were a league-best 64-18.
“The thing I remember the most is that going into winning games during the regular season is no different than what goes into winning a playoff game,” Mazzulla said. “And just because it’s the Finals doesn’t mean you need to focus on anything other than executing the details that are important.”
Mazzulla was asked about whether that’s any concern that the increased break between the Eastern Conference Finals and the Finals could cause him and the coaching staff to overthink the right gameplan.
“What constitutes the right gameplan? If we win?” he asked. “You could not do things well and win, you could do a bunch of things well and lose. I’m not sure what constitutes the right gameplan. We have a specific set of things that we’re looking to take away, and we have a specific set of things that we have to live with. On the offensive end, we have a specific set of things that we want to get to.”
Bonus Content: We didn’t get much footage from practice, but Derrick White and the regular group of assistant coaches competed in a new post-practice trick shot that entailed throwing one up high, shooting the other, and then also shooting the initial ball from the top of the key.
