Tom Westerholm: Giannis Will “Have to Work for Every Bucket” (Celtics-Bucks)

The Boston Celtics stole Game 1 in Milwaukee before the mighty Bucks answered Tuesday with a comfortable victory of their own. With the series all squared up and storylines aplenty, Tom Westerholm of MassLive delves into this fun matchup, which pits Milwaukee and Boston against each other for the second straight postseason. Only, this time, Milwaukee is coming off a 60-win season and the Celtics are able to suit up Kyrie Irving and Gordon Hayward. The Celtics severely limited MVP candidate Giannis Antetokounmpo in Game 1, but he responded with a strong performance in Game 2. How can Boston hope to corral the Greek Freak, and so many more questions answered inside.

Some noteworthy excerpts (*Particular time stamps may vary due to dynamic advertising):
3:54-4:57: “This is a strategy that they’ve employed against Giannis, basically all through last year’s playoffs – let Al Horford guard him one-on-one and then everybody else can get out to shooters. It really hammers home how good Horford is at defending that he was able to do that and that he is able to do that, because every once in a while in this series you see Jayson Tatum or Jaylen Brown, guys who are not small necessarily, get switched onto Giannis and he just blows by them and gets a dunk. It’s replicable just because the Celtics have a guy like Horford, who is as good at defending as he is and who is strong and able to move his feet and able to stay in front…Giannis is going to have a difficult series. He’s gonna have to work for every bucket, every free throw he gets. As much as the Celtics can hope for a win in this series, that’s gonna be what it rests on.”

11:43-12:26: “One of the things to keep in mind with this Celtics team is they do sort of have these stretches, and then sometimes during the regular season that would lead toward finger-pointing, that would lead to guys kind of getting upset with one another, and then that would really snowball, and then you’re talking about a few losses in a row and things can go badly at that point for them. I will say, though, in the locker room everybody was pretty accountable. There wasn’t a lot of, ‘Oh, the young guys needed to do this,’…It was more like Marcus Morris said they need to be setting better screens for Kyrie, and Kyrie said, ‘I need to be better at X, Y and Z.’”

14:12-14:53: “I think that he [Gordon Hayward] has really shown himself improving. He’s a lot better now than he was at the start of the season, a lot more consistent. At the start of the season, when Gordon Hayward would have a good game, it was because he started off making some 3s, and then maybe some other stuff would open up. But basically, if he got hot from 3, the Celtics were gonna be OK, and he was gonna be OK. Now, he’s getting to the rim, he’s aggressive, he’s attacking mismatches, he’s operating out of the pick and roll, he’s defending well, he’s doing a lot of the things that made him good in Utah. He’s not there yet. He’s obviously not an All-Star yet, but you can definitely start to see him putting the pieces together.”

18:10-18:44: “He’s a 50-40-90 guy who averaged 16 points a game during the regular season. That’s huge…You put [Malcolm] Brogdon back in there, and all of a sudden, I mean, if you have Brogdon and Khris Middleton around the perimeter and Giannis charging through the lane, that’s tough. I don’t know that the Celtics necessarily change anything. I think they just need to be really, really sharp with the way they defend and how they rotate.”

28:48-29:25: “Watching their development has been really fun. They’re both smart basketball players, they’re both definitely guys that the organization loves. They love their growth mentality, a thing Brad Stevens likes to talk about. I think both have really, really bright futures. Both of them will probably hear their names in trade rumors this summer, and we’ll see how that goes when we get to it, but for right now, for the Celtics, having two young guys like that who can really pitch in and who are starting to learn how to play alongside other stars is just really, really valuable.”