Well, it’s hard to blame them, really. There are the 17 banners hanging from the ceiling of their Garden. There’s all those playoff games stored up in the muscle memories of Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce. There’s the memory of Red Auerbach’s stogie, and the original parquet, and the visiting locker rooms smaller than the back seat of a ’72 VW Bug.
You add all of that together, you get the Boston Celtics playing with house money when they face the Knicks starting Saturday, and you get the attitude of just about every Celtics fan, eloquently and elegantly summarized in the words of Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy yesterday:
“Celtics versus Knicks in the first round of the playoffs? Bring it on!” Shaughnessy wrote. “This amounts to a marquee matchup in an ever-diluted playoff spring. These staggering Celtics always can get into the heads of the Knicks. Carmelo Anthony is an overrated ball hog who never will win an NBA championship.”
And thus were the first shots fired at Lexington and Concord.
It’s hard to blame them, really. For the past few weeks, there has been a lot of talk in these parts about whom the Knicks would draw in the first round of the playoffs, whom they should want to draw. Would it be more advantageous to tank — um, make that rest players — just a little to draw, oh, say, the Hawks, who have 17 fewer banners than the Celtics and 99.3 percent less history to speak of?
To the credit of the men who will play and coach in the series, that was never much of an issue. Knicks coach Mike Woodson, for starters, said, “It didn’t matter to me who we played,” in the immediate aftermath of the 90-80 win over the Pacers yesterday at his Garden that both wrapped up the No. 2 seed in the Eastern Conference and assured a second Knicks-Celtics first-round matchup in the last three years.
“What’s more important to our team and franchise was to secure home court for the playoffs, and we are able to secure the second round as well now,” Woodson said. “We are going to have to deal with Boston.”
Actually, it’s the folks who follow the Knicks who will really have to deal with Boston, who first learned about the Celtics, if they’re old enough, when they broke the upstart Knicks’ hearts in 1969, Bill Russell’s final season. The Celtics themselves shouldn’t bother anybody, not unless Rajon Rondo somehow walks through that door, not unless Ray Allen somehow walks through that door. But history doesn’t color inside the lines.
And that’s fine. The nerve Shaughnessy touched is the same one Yankees fans always exploited across 8 1/2 decades of dominance in their own geographic skirmishes with the Red Sox, the one where success breeds success and failure breeds failure and until you see the evidence in cold black-and-white — until Ruben Sierra is hitting a ground ball to Pokey Reese, or until Garnett walks off the court an eliminated loser — there is always going to be doubt.
It’s just hard to see the Knicks falling into those potholes. Not the way they’re playing now. Not the way they’re taking care of business, ticking off their goals one-by-one with seamless precision: the division, the No. 2 seed and now two games to rest the weary and heal the wounded.
“We had the opportunity to take care of business,” Jason Kidd said. “And we took care of business.”
Kidd knows well about the subject. When he was guiding the Nets to consecutive appearances in the Finals a decade ago, the hallmark of that team — at least as it dominated the East — was this: They became extraordinary closers. No matter what the goal at hand — division, seeding, winning playoff series — those Nets almost never wasted time. They closed. They took care of business.
In that sense, these Knicks seem to mirror the soul of those Nets. When asked to elevate their effort, when charged with the mission of winning the game in front of them … so far, they have. The Celtics should be just another mission on the coming calendar. And if those players were wearing different jerseys, the rest of the city might be as confident as the team.
Which is fine. The Knicks will have plenty of time to convince the nervous and convert the skeptical. Starting Saturday, the next phase of expectation begins anew. Which means Saturday can’t get here soon enough.