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Kyrie Irving made his awaited debut in a Boston Celtics uniform on Monday night in a preseason opener against the Charlotte Hornets, collecting his first unofficial win with the team, 94-82.
The now-cornerstone of the team was impressed with the ball movement under head coach Brad Stevens, as the C's collected 14 assists in their 18 made buckets before entering half time, cutting the starters' night short.
“It was awesome, man,” Irving said of the ball movement, according to Jay King of MassLive. “Beautiful to be a part of. It was beautiful to watch.”
“Sometimes we even got into a span of making the extra, extra pass. And when you're in a group like that, you know you're playing with some great guys.”
Stevens offered that his mindset was not honed into calling plays, but rather building chemistry in different sets and letting his players develop it by being on the court with each other, cautioning there's no thing as over-passing this early into preseason.
“Not on October 2, there's not,” Stevens said. ” I think that you're trying to build a sharing mindset, a high-motor mindset, on both ends of the floor. When you play defense, you play defense hard as a team. You cover for one another. And when you play offense, you play hard as a team. And so hopefully we'll continue to build that. So far, they've really tried. It's just a matter of, I think, getting a little bit crisper.”
In what was a preseason-typical struggle from the field for both teams, the Celtics won the rebound battle against a team with length and size and managed 26 assists with only 10 turnovers, feat which gives the team hope for even more moving forward.
