Whatever you are, that’s how your team has to play night in and night out in order to win games. Every team has an identity that has been established based on that group of players that year. If you have an established program, you may be fortunate to be that team every year.

With the Celtics, we are a defensive team. Most of the time we’re a team that will win because of defense. If our defense is what it should be and what we work on every day, then we will always be in the game regardless of how our offense is that night. But we have found that if our defense is below our standards, we will often find ourselves in a game that’s tough for us to win. Calling on our offense to bail us out is not something we want to rely on.

This was evident in our game the other night. We made shot after shot in the first quarter against a team that relies on offense, and they weren’t hitting their shots. As the second quarter unfolded, we started to miss shots, but our defensive rhythm wasn’t there. They started hitting shots; that’s who they are as a team. We were lucky to go into halftime up by 4.

The same pattern held true for the 3rd quarter. Fortunately, we found our defense in the 4th quarter and won the game. The lesson learned is that we either forgot who we were or we thought we could always get back to who we were when we wanted to. We were fortunate, because we’ve found that switches don’t work in the NBA; we cannot turn it on and off. We have to be who we are in order to get to where we want to go!