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C's Excited for Lengthy Scrimmage at Open Practice

Marc D'Amico
Team Reporter and Analyst

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BOSTON – TD Garden is open for basketball once again. Well, sort of.

The Boston Celtics returned to TD Garden Friday night for an open practice in front of their loyal season ticket holders and corporate partners. The team is expected to run through drills before playing two 12-minute scrimmages in front of the crowd.

Brad Stevens told media members that he will take a step back and observe the scrimmage from afar, noting that he has “talked enough” over the first four days of training camp. He’ll observe and evaluate the C’s as they complete their longest scrimmage to this point.

With a double-session on each of the first two days of camp, Boston has yet to play an extended scrimmage. In fact, as Stevens said, none of the team’s scrimmage time in practice has surpassed five minutes of action. Tonight, the team will more than double that amount of play – twice.

Stevens is excited about this open practice much more than he was a season ago, simply because he believes the team will get much more accomplished. As he stated before practice tipped off, he thinks the team is in much better position this time around to capitalize on the opportunity at TD Garden.

"Last year we had this later in the preseason. We had already played eight exhibition games," Stevens said. "We needed a couple of days off more than we needed an open practice. So we came out here and didn’t do much. And I felt like it would be better to scrimmage, and if we could do it earlier than it would be better, and that’s why we scheduled it for today. This is practice No. 7, so this is a good time to put 12 minutes on the clock and play two games."

The players are excited for tonight's action as well. They just need to make it through the 24 minutes of run.

“I just hope there will be media timeouts so we can catch our breath, with how fast we’ve been playing lately,” Jared Sullinger joked.

On a serious note, though, Sullinger stated that this is a great opportunity for the Celtics to continue their growth as a team.

“We’re just trying to get better,” Sullinger said. “We’ve just got to execute ourselves, defensively, offensively, and I think it’s going to be helpful.”

Newcomer Evan Turner agrees. He noted that this live-game environment will be quite different than the “scrimmages” the team has played through during its first six practices.

“I think with 12-minute games,” said Turner, “you kind of have to play through tough situations and you have an opportunity to consistently impact the pick-up a little bit.

“In practice, we only go up and down three times or so, so when you start getting your blood flowing, the drill’s over. So here I think we’ll have more of an opportunity to get things done and kind of get more into a game flow.”

While the players get into their game flow, Stevens will be evaluating. This could very possibly be his best opportunity yet to evaluate his players and work on a rotation.