AJC > Sports > Hawks > Blog > Archives > 2008 > June > 06
Friday, June 6, 2008
I heard it was a good one
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
SMYRNA - Like most of you, I had big plans for Game 1 of the NBA Finals Thursday night.
And it didn’t matter that the game took longer to get here than that rebate check (thank you David Stern and the NBA schedule makers who think it’s cool to start the Finals six weeks after the completion of the conference finals) Bush and the boys promised.
The 9:30 (or somewhere close to it) tip off is what did me in, though. Everything was going according to plan during the first half of the Celtics’ 98-88 win. But the fatigue set in around halftime, when the Lakers appeared to be in tenuous control of the action.
Midway through the third quarter, however, seems appeared to be changing. And by the time I fell asleep late in the third, it was anyone’s game. So I wasn’t stunned to see the 10-point margin of victory for the Celtics this morning.
The Celtics are doing the same exact thing they were doing a month ago when they were battling the Hawks in that first round series. They haven’t changed their mode of operation one iota since then, and that’s a testament to the job Doc Rivers (who gets Mike Woodson-like venom thrown his way in Boston) has done all season.
Rivers has kept his team focused on the bigger prize and not the immediate result of each and every second of every game. The Celtics made a commitment to getting to this stage, a place I frankly wasn’t sure they’d be able to reach after Game 4 of that series against the Hawks.
But I have give credit where it’s due, the Celtics took shots from the Hawks, Cavaliers and Pistons and still found a way to get here. And they don’t appear to be looking back. My feeling before the Hawks-Celtics series was that Paul Pierce was going to be the Celtics’ best matchup nightmare in that series and really throughout the duration of the Celtics’ playoff run. And that’s held true.
Again, I go back to the job Rivers has done. He’s always managed to play to that strength, even when things got tight and the easy fallback option would have been to play through Kevin Garnett, who isn’t the same type of offensive catalyst that Pierce can be when he’s on his game (Pierce isn’t Kobe Bryant, of course, but he has that same stomp-on-your-throat attitude when the game is on the line and the ball is in his hands).
What Rivers told his team after Pierce went down with that leg injury (only to pull the hero routine and come back with those two huge 3-pointers) was nothing short of genius. He could have spent the entire timeout scribbling away on that little clipboard. But all the Xs and Os in the world don’t make a difference if you can’t properly motivate your guys. That should be obvious by now.
All that said, the Lakers could still be in the process of winning this thing in five or six games - the prediction of most of the so-called pundits (you know, all those know-it-alls that tell us year after year that the Eastern Conference team has no chance against the mighty Western Conference).
But I’m done underestimating these Celtics. We should all know better by now. Just like you had your doubts about them when they were belly crawling their way through that series with the Hawks.
This series is up for grabs.
Now if I could just stay up late enough to watch it while it’s happening everything will be fine.
