Last year at this exact moment in the Celtics season–after losing a brutal Game 6 to a lower-seeded team on the road–I boarded a plane for a week’s vacation to Central America. I was relieved to be leaving the Celtics behind. I don’t like to admit this, but I lost faith in the team during that Hawks series. I became the kind of fan I never want to be–angry with the players, feeling as if they had betrayed me. I said things like, “You can’t win a title if you’re playing seven grueling games against a bad team like Atlanta,” or, “They deserve to be eliminated.” As if the players weren’t trying their best! As if I could understand the pressure three championship-less superstars were feeling after a 66-win regular season.
A year later, we again have a 60-win Celtics team needing to win a Game 7 at home to put away a young, mediocre team. My mindset couldn’t be more different. The team has no realistic chance to win the title this season, but I badly want this game. I’m not quite ready to anoint tonight “our NBA Finals,” as Bill Simmons did in yet another excellent column on the series, but I understand where he’s coming from. This game is about laying claim to the status of “winner” in the greatest first-round series of all-time and arguably the most competitive NBA series ever.
They will show clips of this series from now on every time these two teams face each other and whenever any first-round series approaches this level of competitiveness. It’ll be first in the montage of clips featuring Dikembe Mutombo on the floor after Game 5 in Seattle, Allan Houston’s front rim-backboard-front rim-and-in shot against Miami in ’99 and Golden State running Dallas off the floor in 2007. You want your team to be on the winning side of that kind of history. You want the reminders to make you happy. Ask Yankee fans how they feel every time a team falls behind 3-0 in a playoff series.
I feel a mix of pride and trepidation about this Celtics team. I’m proud of how hard they’ve played given the burden on the five starters and the thin bench. The players and the bully pulpit columnists can talk all they want about how minutes don’t matter, how this is the playoffs, how these guys played three games a day when they were kids. But minutes do matter, and fatigue is a factor. It matters that Paul Pierce played his most minutes this season since ’05-06, and it matters that he and Ray Allen and Kendrick Perkins played a record 26 grueling playoff games last year.
So I admire their toughness for dragging their bodies around for so many minutes in this series. Seriously, check the numbers: 44.7 minutes per game for Pierce, 46.5 for Rondo, 40.7 for Allen (despite the foul out in Game 5), 43.2 for Big Baby and 39.2 for Perk. These guys are killing themselves in this series. We should salute them for it.
But that’s where my trepidation comes in. Before this series, I thought the Pierce-Allen-Rondo gave the Celtics the three best players on the floor and that they alone would provide the edge. I am a little disturbed that despite the KG-less “Big Three,” the Bulls have proven to be Boston’s equal. Does that hint at future problems? I don’t know. The Bulls are not playing out of their minds, as some people are suggesting. They are shooting 44.9 percent, down from 45.7 in the regular season, their effective field goal percentage is identical to what it was in the regular season and their turnover rate is up from 13.3 percent to 13.9 percent. The Celtics are grabbing 26.8 percent of available offensive boards, third best among playoff teams.
The Bulls are playing well, but now “holy crap!” well. The Celtics have stepped down a notch both offensively and defensively (I’ll save the numbers for a series recap)–not a huge drop, but a noticeable one.
Next year, the Celtics will get KG back and hopefully return to their normal level of play. Hopefully the minutes Pierce and Allen have played in this series haven’t resulted in too much wear and tear. Regardless of what happens tonight, this team has another run in them, and we’ll need the stars healthy.
That said, let’s go and get Game 7.
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