Boston Celtics head coach Brad Stevens opened up a bit on the courts the team will be playing on this Friday for their first scrimmage exhibition game of the resumed 2019-20 season against the Oklahoma City Thunder at Thursday’s post-practice media availability session.
And he sounded as excited about it as the famously mild-mannered coach gets off of a parquet.
“I think there will be — I know that they’ve got enhancements planned for the games themselves that will make it look even better,” offered Stevens of the as-of-yet unknown bells and whistles the Disney-hosted restart will have at its disposal to spice up contests in the absence of fans.
“The court, the setup, the video boards around the court, all their plans to use those video boards creatively, some of which they probably are doing now — although I didn’t watch many of the games, but I know they’re holding back some of those ideas — are all ridiculously creative, and I couldn’t say enough good things about the way that they’ve set up those courts there.”
“When I first walked in I actually toured it with Masai Ujiri and Kyle Lowry [of the Toronto Raptors], and I think we were all just kind of blown away by the setup,” he added.
What Stevens was alluding to was actually discussed in a video by USA TODAY Sports’ own Mark Medina earlier in the day, Medina present to cover the goings-on of the Disney NBA campus from within.
[protected-iframe id=”48c0b72a6158cf9bb0b79573727123d9-134770808-157869264″ info=”https://uw-media.usatoday.com/embed/video/3287968001?placement=snow-embed” width=”540″ height=”350″ frameborder=”0″ scrolling=”no”]
“All these teams were playing without fans because of safety concerns,” related the USA TODAY reporter, “so you definitely saw a difference because there wasn’t that rabid atmosphere that fans create.”
“To address that, the NBA tweaked its game operations a little bit. They have a lot of large video boards around the arena, and that allows them to provide more interaction. You have a scoreboard, you have the home team logos for the designated home team. Every time the home team scores, they’ll show that player profile. When the home team is on defense, they’re having a chant of “defense” being played. There’s a lot more music being played, and I think all the teams had a fun time with this atmosphere, and teams are saying there’s probably going to be more tweaks to come.”
“It was really cool to see — you could tell that players and coaches wanted to make sure that their bench was livelier than usual to make up for the fact that there weren’t any fans in the building,” suggested Medina.
While there had been a bit of mild discontent about the noise levels, it seemed well-embraced by most interviewed, and Stevens seems pretty excited himself to see what’s in store for the scrimmage Friday.
And if players — or fans — find themselves especially off-put by the new ideas, they’ll likely be ‘tweaked,’ as Medina put it, given his “suspicion is that after a few games, teams will get used to it, and it’ll be all about the competition on the court.”
[lawrence-related id=39237,39228,39221,39209]