Kyrie Irving did his best to decipher what's been going wrong in the past three games against the Milwaukee Bucks, as the Boston Celtics followed five straight postseason wins with utter disappointment in this series, now on the brink of elimination.
Irving has quickly realized the full extent of the Bucks' game plan, one forged as a live chess match that forces him and his teammates to read and react based on the play at hand.
“We could sit up here and say, like, ‘OK, we need to do this right, we need to do this right,’” Irving said after the game, according to Jay King of The Athletic. “But at the end of the day they’re still going to make you think. And throughout the game they’ve been making us think and making us kind of make reads. And we failed to do so at certain times. But in certain points of the game we look really great, we feel really good.”
The Bucks have ensnared the Celtics in a pick-your-poison dilemma, one neither Brad Stevens nor Irving have been able to crack throughout the extent of this series.
“(Bucks coach) Mike (Budenholzer) does a great job of calling plays on the fly, plays that have worked all series,” Irving said. “They know these are the bread and butter, they’re scoring at a high clip on these particular plays, these three plays. And regardless of whether we switch or make adjustments he still knows that’s something that they can go to. So I think that gives us confidence to look at film and know exactly what those plays are, but we just have (to be better).”
Irving has been ghastly in these past four games after racking up 26 points and 11 assists in Game 1, shooting less than 37% from the floor in Games 2-though-4, and struggling to solve the puzzle Budenholzer and his players have laid out there for him.
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