As a paying customer or merely a (basketball) fan, there’s nothing better regarding any game, but especially a playoff series, than to see the contestants have to sweat it out physically and mentally.
The first three games between the Celtics and the Magic were strictly no sweat. One team came to win; the other played dead.
How exactly did the conference finals go from sweepin’ to sweatin’? On the threshold of pulling the plug on the comatose Magic, the Celts are plummeting like my portfolio after Doc Rivers’ outfit got blackjacked in Orlando, giving birth to two words I never thought I’d be writing . . .
. . . Game 6 . . . that’s really a Game 7 in the battered bodies and muddled minds of the Celtics.
In Game 4, Boston’s elders, exempting Ray Allen, didn’t look their age until overtime; his two triples were the team’s sole production.
In Game 5, the tired blood and dead legs belonging to Allen, Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce fired 33 rounds, 22 of ’em blanks. Beaten and bloodied, Boston could not match strokes (Vince Carter was the lone victor to shoot under 50 percent) or brute force with Orlando.
Tonight’s home hospice advantage for Game 6 should compensate for some of the above . . . as long as the Celtics aren’t forced to sweat the full 48 minutes or more . . . and there are enough bed pans to go around.
What it can’t offset or disregard is the concussion Glen Davis sustained in Game 5 from a Dwight Howard elbow during a pursuit for a rebound in traffic.
Translation: More abuse for concern in the Commonwealth.
Based on a glut of appalling, long-lasting harm due to head trauma, the NFL, as of 2009, forbids management alone from determining when players are allowed back on the field following such damage. An independent neurological consultant makes that evaluation in conjunction with a team physician(s) following a neurological examination.
Given the pressure Danny Ainge and Rivers are under to advance to the finals, I expect, nonetheless, a judicious judgment by Boston’s decision-makers to protect Davis from himself . . . because players always want to play, no matter what.
In contrast, Celtics’ news isn’t all bad. The league rescinded the demonstrative second of Kendrick Perkins’ technical fouls in Game 5, meaning he slipped the suspension (Joe DeRosa vouched for him) until the very next time he hacks somebody and immediately complains, standard pouting procedure for these two whiny-hinny squads.
Rarely is a whistle blown these enchanted evenings without the perpetrator staging some kind of histrionic. Rasheed Wallace has a new routine of late. Mr. T approaches the ref after each foul to plead his case.
New Rule: NBA players should only be permitted to visit with an official three times a game — after that he’s tossed.
So, can Orlando go from being dead wrong, ain’t got it goin’ on, to dead even?
Aside from unadulterated youth and pure innocence being on their side (“Big deal, so 63 NBA teams were unable to overcome 0-3 deficits! We’ve won four straight before, why should this be any different?”) what’s strongly in the Magic’s favor is they’re no longer reliant on Carter.
Surely they’ve always suspected they couldn’t count on him when the going got tough. But they were clueless whether they could win without him. In the last two games, as Carter went 4-for-19 from the field while Howard and Jameer Nelson took command, and J.J. Redick emerged as an all-around factor on both sides of the sphere, and Stan Van Gundy finally recognized Brandon Bass, they discovered the answer.
Does all that add up to an epic Celtics’ collapse? Should the home hospice not be enough, does anyone in their nursing home honestly believe Old Man Rivers can avoid making NBA history in Orlando?
Is BP going to get fined by David Stern for tampering with the natural order of things?
“I actually feel sorry for people who have nothing to do on Memorial Day weekend other than ask those questions,” Stan Van Gundy said.
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Not for nothin’, but with all the money I shell out for home entertainment, why can’t I get those “back channels” where Phil Jackson and LeBron James are supposedly starring. Or, maybe they’re just scrambled . . . like porn.
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Good thing about the NBA . . . even though it’s tense time in the playoffs, there’s usually more than enough well-crafted comedy off the court.
Our most recent installment finds the Knicks’ Eddy Curry ordered to settle up a small debt . . . oh, about $1.2 million. Hey, if AIG was too big to fail, what does that make this guy?
Seems Curry defaulted on a $570,000 personal loan and his lifestyle featured a $17,000-a-month bed in the ‘burbs, $6,000-a-month personal chef and a dozen cars he had bought for himself and relatives.
Curry was requested by a guy wearing a robe and holding a gavel to pay 75G a month to Vegas-based lender Allstar Capital Inc. The same robe-gavel guy also told Curry to give up three of the cars . . . a Rolls Royce Phantom convertible, and two Land Rover SUVs, all 2009 models. He swears he can do this.
I’m guessing for Curry, there’s no such thing as tightening the belt.
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Having had Mike Brown banished from the bench, LeBron asked Magic Johnson what to do next.
Belated big ups to Knicks forward Wilson Chandler for his marijuana arrest. Police in Queens pulled him over and smelled pot . . . .or, as Camp Cablevision refers to it, “The World’s Most Famous Aroma.”