A Long Road Awaits Celtics

Posted by Brian Robb on Feb 14, 2012 270027 commentshttp%3A%2F%2Fcelticshub.com%2F2012%2F02%2F14%2Fa-long-road-awaits-celtics%2FA+Long+Road+Awaits+Celtics2012-02-14+17%3A52%3A41Brian+Robbhttp%3A%2F%2Fcelticshub.com%2F%3Fp%3D27002

Right now, the Celtics have played just nine road games, tied with Golden State for the fewest thus far in the 2011-12 regular season. They’ve gone a respectable 4-5 over that stretch, with wins coming against juggernauts such as Washington (twice), Toronto and Orlando.

Ideally, during the first third of the season with 66 percent of the team’s games coming at home would be a place where the C’s would be able to beef up their record over a tumultuous 66 game season. Instead, they spent much of the time doing damage control from their 5-9 slow start. Despite the improvement over recent weeks, Danny Ainge is not impressed as noted by Gary Washburn in today’s Globe:

“The team is playing better,’’ he said yesterday. “We have a real challenge ahead of us. The schedule gets really hard. We have a lot of road games coming up but our team has been playing much, much better. Our team is playing well over the past few weeks, but we need to get better.’’

“What I have seen league-wide is there’s been some very inconsistent play with most every team,’’ Ainge said. “And that’s certainly been the case with us. I did expect us to have some good stretches and not-so-good stretches throughout the course of this year, even before the season started, but I knew we were a better team than we were playing [like] at the beginning of the year. We still have a long way to go, there’s a lot of games in a short period of time, and we’re going to be tested.’’

In essence, Ainge is telling it like it is. There is no room for the C’s to run and hide now with the limited margin for error they’ve left themselves. A three or four game swoon may be the nail in the coffin for this team with a trigger-happy Ainge at the helm waiting patiently to shuffle some pieces.

That’s why you’ll like be seeing Doc Rivers letting his starters sink or swim for much of the next three weeks. Outside of Kevin Garnett’s health, there’s not a lot to hold back now, knowing that you might not have this roster to work with in a month from now. The time is now for this team and they’ve got to play like it if they want to have a chance to play for a championship together in May and June.