Pregame Post-Ups: Rare Home-and-Home Tests Ability to Adjust

BOSTON – Home-and-home series’ have become quite rare during the NBA regular season, but Celtics coach Brad Stevens cherishes them when they pop up on the schedule. Boston will wrap up its first such series in nearly three years Tuesday night in facing the Detroit Pistons for their second straight matchup.

What Stevens likes about the concept is that it has a real postseason vibe to it. Home-and-homes test teams’ abilities to adjust quickly, and that’s what Stevens expects the Pistons to do after dropping Game 1 to the Celtics, 109-89, Saturday night in Detroit.

“I think it’s good, because if you’re fortunate enough to play down the road, you do this over, and over, and over,” Stevens said ahead of Tuesday night’s rematch at TD Garden. “So, I think the idea of playing well, winning a game, the other team comes in with a heightened sense of urgency because of how the game went, and you have to match that. I think that’s really good.”

Sure enough, Detroit is planning to make several adjustments for Game 2. Pistons head coach Dwane Casey went into detail about some of the things his team needs to fix, including better ball movement, better rebounding and more physical play on the defensive side of the ball.

“We’ve got to make sure we put pressure on their shots,” said Casey, whose team allowed the Celtics to shoot season-high clips from the field (45.3 percent) and from 3-point range (41.2 percent). “We’ve got to get to them and make them feel us. If you give guys feel-good shots, anybody in the NBA will get into a rhythm, and I thought Boston got into a great rhythm.”

The C’s also believe that Detroit will adjust on the offensive end in order to get Blake Griffin more involved. Griffin entered Saturday’s game as the NBA’s leading scorer, but the C’s managed to limit him to just seven points on 2-of-13 shooting.

“Blake is going to come out and be really, really aggressive,” Gordon Hayward said in anticipation. “We held him to a season-low, and he’s been averaging 30 or whatever, so he’s definitely going to be more aggressive.

“They’re probably going to pick up the intensity and their physicality defensively, so we just have to try to do the same thing. We have to match the same energy that we did and really play with a sense of urgency and have a big-time focus.”

Making such quick adjustments make great practice for what’s to come down the road, so the Celtics are cherishing their chance to do so tonight as they wrap up their home-and-home series with Detroit.

- Taylor Snow

addByline("Taylor C. Snow", "Celtics.com", "taylorcsnow");