Micah Shrewsberry is no longer on Brad Stevens' staff following taking an assistant coaching job at Purdue, but he was up and close and personal with Stevens during the frustrating 2018-19 season, which ended with a playoff exit against the Bucks in the Eastern Conference semifinals.
Shrewsberry opened up on the year to the Boston Globe's Adam Himmelsbach where he got into Stevens' mindset.
“I think he really beat himself up,” Shrewsberry told Himmelsbach. “Even when he was doing a great job, even when he was putting everything toward it, he still looked toward himself during all those moments. Hopefully guys appreciated that. ... He was always looking for ways to fix our problems and saying, ‘How can I be better to help these guys be more successful?’ But I think Brad, it probably still eats him up. But now it’s kind of laid the foundation for him in how things need to be, and how he’s going to approach things in the future.”
He added: “We were never able to really galvanize ourselves as a team for a long stretch. We would do it in short spurts, but then just wouldn’t carry that over. That’ll be something that eats at us as coaches and players.”
While it was a disappointing end to the year, Shrewsberry noted Stevens is already hard at work to make things better for next season.
“He’s definitely locked in,” he said. “He’s back to reading all the quotes and seeing what the best teams are doing. ‘Here’s where we failed, here’s how we’re going to correct it, and we’ll get to the roster when it happens.’ But he’s all the way back and locked into next year and being ready, like, let’s have a great one next year.”
Shrewsberry added: "It’s kind of a ‘When can we start? How can we get through this summer so we can get back to playing again?’ There’s kind of an optimism, and a bad taste that you want to get rid of quickly.”
The next order of business for the team will be the NBA draft, which is slated for June 20.
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