Celtics Notebook: Florida road show useful preparation

The Celtics fly to Orlando Monday for an extended Florida stay — they close out exhibition season with games in the Disney kingdom Wednesday and Miami on Friday — and there’s no time like now to get ready for the regular season’s opening burst of road games.

The Celtics will be tested early, with seven of their first 10 games on the road, including their Oct. 20 season opener in New York. Looking back on his own playing career, especially in San Antonio, head coach Ime Udoka can speak at length about the value of toughness away from home.

“I think that’s across the board everywhere I’ve been. You can take it back to the San Antonio days, we were one of the best road teams, traditionally,” Udoka said after Sunday’s practice. “Myself as a player, I always enjoyed going on the road. I always tell the guys that there’s no better feeling as a player or as a coach than to watch the fans empty out of a building.

“So you want to have that confidence on the road, and it can’t just be a home thing,” he said. “You’re going to have to be playoff tested, you gotta be able to win on the road, so all those things go hand in hand, but I think that confidence and that mentality carries whether you’re on the road or at home. So it’s something we have preached to them, especially with our start, like I said, seven out of 10 are on the road.”

As such, preparing to hit the hardwood running is a priority for this coaching staff.

“I think it’s a continuation from the preseason and some of the things we’ve done but you start to see pretty quickly what works for you, what lineups and what schemes as well, both defensively and offensively, what plays,” he said. “So you’re learning each other as you go, but you always want to get off to a get off to a good start, especially with seven of our first 10 are on the road this year, so we want to get off to a good start playing well on the road. So it’s a little bit of both. The shorter preseason, we feel like we’re going week-by-week and that will continue into the regular season. But at the same time, we have to find out what works for us to win games at the same time, so it’s a little bit of both.”

Schroder prognosis

Udoka sounds confident that Dennis Schroder, who missed Saturday’s exhibition win over Toronto, will be back in the mix this week.

“He just took a fall in practice the other day. He tested it out yesterday before the game, but he didn’t feel quite comfortable going, especially (since) I was being cautious obviously with the preseason game,” he said. “Got him some treatment today, he got it looked at, we’ll go through practice tomorrow and then we’ll determine what’s going on for Wednesday. But we all feel comfortable that he’ll be able to go. We’ll just test it out tomorrow and know more about it then.”

Big plans

Udoka continues to have great confidence in his double-big starting combination of Al Horford and Rob Williams, regardless of trends across the league.

“I think with Al’s strength and some of the versatility he has, you can get away with it,” said the coach. “There are still teams that play double bigs, and then teams that try to downsize with small ball fours, whether it’s  P.J. Tucker or a guy like last night, the young kid, there are guys he can actually guard and do well with. But also offensively he complements Rob very well — one guy can pick and pop and mix it up, and Rob is more of a roller there. When Al was in the pick-and-roll yesterday and Rob was in the dunker spot, I thought they worked really well together. We will stagger them as well, but Al brings a lot to the table. I don’t think it’s as much of a problem as people seem to think, playing two bigs.”

Udoka is experimenting with smaller combinations as well. He sounds particularly intrigued by a Schroder/Payton Pritchard ballhandling duo off the bench, with Pritchard’s shooting a particular benefit.

“Another thing we’ve talked about that’s worked well in practice, and we want to see if it can translate to the games, would be Dennis and Payton playing together at times,” he said. “Two playmakers and obviously Payton’s shooting ability. We want to see at times if we can get away with that smaller lineup, especially at the guard spot. So we’re looking at all those things in the preseason and we’ll look at some of those lineups in these last two games.”