(Don't cry LeBron, they still love you in ... New York?)
The Boston Celtics had us fooled. Either that, or we simply didn't believe them.
When the Celtics were going through one of their many dry spells during the season, and fans were getting a little impatient, it was all part of a plan. Doc Rivers insisted he was trying to limit the minutes of his aging stars, making sure his rotation was 100 percent healthy when the playoffs came around.
And still, fans and so-called experts claimed a team simply couldn't "turn it on" when the playoffs started. Well, the joke is on you.
During the postgame press conference after last night's 94-85 win over the Cavaliers, a victory that likely ended LeBron James' time in Cleveland, Celtics forward Paul Pierce said something very telling about this team.
I'm paraphrasing here, but Bob Ryan of the Boston Globe asked Pierce how proud he was of this win, and where it ranks. Pierce said he wasn't very proud of this victory because he and the Celtics didn't come into the seasons wanting to beat Cleveland. They came into the season wanting to win a championship. And today, they still have that chance.
LeBron, whose name we'll hear only about a billion times between now and July 1, so brace yourself, finished with a triple double: 27 points, 19 rebounds and 10 assists. But is it safe to say that he didn't play that well? He had nine turnovers, and only during that spurt early in the fourth quarter, when he hit back-to-back pullup 3-pointers, did he look like a superstar.
I'm not sure I've seen a more selfish player in my life. I wrote in this space earlier this season that LeBron shouldn't be talking about where he's going next year when he's wearing a Cavs uniform. It's quite disrespectful.
But let's face facts: LeBron didn't want to win this game. If he did, you would have seen a different player this series. And you would have seen him go all out during that last minute Thursday night. Instead, he just sat there and watched the Celtics run out the clock.
His mind was elsewhere during Game 6, and he made that quite apparent.
1 comment:
I think the Celtics had themselves fooled. A month or so ago, I doubt anyone on that team seriously thought a trip to the Eastern Conference finals was in the realm of possibility. It's also unlikely that the late-season slide was an elaborate Doc Rivers plan to get the aging stars some rest.
It's nothing more than a coincidence that, not long ago, the Celtics looked dead in the water, and now they're playing for a trip to the finals.
I know many Celtics fans, like Scott, take particular pleasure in the C's succeeding at the cost of the Cavs. This hatred of LeBron James has always baffled me, but I've given up trying to figure it out. And the criticism he faced during this series makes no sense. He's not the first superstar to play poorly when his team needed him the most. Charles Barkley, Karl Malone, even the great Michael Jordan, occasionally, stunk it up in the playoffs.
Granted, LeBron's Game 5 performance was brutal. But in Game 6, he put up 27 points, 19 rebounds and 10 assists, remarkably similar to the numbers Rajon Rondo tallied in Game 4 that some called the greatest playoff performance in Celtic history. Of course everything looks better in a win, but how can anyone fault LeBron for what he did.
It was strange how, in the last minute of the game, the Cavs, James included, looked lackadaisical. But I suppose I'd rather a team acknowledge that it's beat, instead of committing senseless fouls to stop the clock in a futile attempt to come back.
Bottom line: the Cavs stunk as a team. It's not fair to put the full blame for their demise on LeBron.
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