Boston Celtics Show Signs of Life
It's easy for people to say the Boston Celtics are cooked. They lost to the Nets. The Nets now have six wins this season.
Going into Tuesday night’s game in Detroit you couldn’t assume the Celtics would answer back with a vengeance. That team is gone. Everything the Celtics do now they have to earn. They have to eek out wins by the skin of their teeth.The Celtics did not play well in a 105-100 win against the Pistons. The game was sloppy resulting in 61 free-throws (evenly distributed 31-30 in favor of the Celtics). They played without their center Kendrick Perkins who stayed home with Nate Robinson’s flu and relied on heavy minutes from Sheldon Williams and Glen Davis. Nate Robinson may have had his best game since joining the team, scoring 14 points, courtesy of four 3-pointers.
With the way the Celtics have been playing (mediocre) it is nice to have a win any way you can get it. The next few weeks in March should be interesting as the Celts play middle-of-the-road teams like Charlotte, Philadelphia, Washington, Memphis and Milwaukee before a Sunday afternoon match-up in Cleveland.
If the Celtics had beaten Cleveland in their last match-up (which they could have done if they scored more than 32 points in the second half and maybe didn’t allow 35 points in the 4th quarter) and then lost to the Nets, people may not have written them off so quickly. But the fact is they didn’t. They lost both games and it makes these games leading up to the rematch even more important.
I would say the Celtics have been written-off two or three times this season: following the sweep by Atlanta and the recent loss to the Nets, at least. It is easy to believe this team could lose in the first round. It is real easy to believe they couldn’t take the Hawks, Cavs or Magic to a seven game series. But Boston has seen too much to lose faith so quickly. Last second field goals, game-four steals to spark an impossible series win, a 24-point fourth quarter comeback … fans know better. This team still has the self-proclaimed greatest human alive Paul Pierce (or something like that), 85 percent of Kevin Garnett, Rajon Rondo (who hit two big free throws in Detroit), and Jesus Shuttlesworth.
It’s true, they aren’t steamrolling anyone into the Finals, but they’re not rolling over without a fight, either. The season starts in round one of the playoffs.
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