Orlando 84, Boston 82

What's Doc Rivers waiting for?

[recap] [box score] [highlights]

I'm not going to blame this loss on Doc Rivers. Boston played terribly for much of the game and wouldn't have been a possession from winning if it weren't for some poor shooting by Orlando.

Nor am I prepared to say that this game mattered that much. Sure, a win would have given the Celtics a near-lock on the second seed in the East -- and with it, home-court advantage in a semifinal series with these very same Magic -- but all is not lost. Orlando has a game on Boston in the loss column, but Boston, for now, has the tiebreaker of a better conference record. And frankly, even though the Cs have now lost seven of their last eight games in Orlando, I don't think they need homecourt to beat the Magic in a seven-game series.

Still, homecourt advantage would have been a nice thing to have in the back pocket, a nice safety blanket, and Wednesday night was a real shot at locking it up. With that in mind, then, why did Kevin Garnett play only 17 minutes?

Oh, I know the given reason. He's coming off the knee injury, and Doc wants to bring him back slowly, play him eight minutes in the first quarter and then eight minutes in the third quarter, just like a preseason game, no exceptions.

I appreciate that if Boston had a choice of what they could have this postseason, homecourt versus Orlando or a fully healthy KG, they should choose the latter without hesitation. But Garnett is a professional athlete, and a highly-conditioned one at that. Moreover, he's undoubtedly going to play more minutes per game as the regular season winds down; the Boston Globe is reporting that KG will play an additional eight minutes per game starting next week.

Given that, then, would it really have hurt to play him, say, 21 or 22 minutes instead of 17 last night? Might his presence on the court, in the stead of Glen Davis, opened up the court a bit more for Paul Pierce or Ray Allen? Might he have grabbed an offensive rebound the Celtics didn't otherwise get? Might he have scored the basket needed to win the game?

I don't know the answers to those questions. But the risk of playing KG an extra three minutes this one time was minimal, and the potential rewards were great. With an effective three-game lead on Orlando, it's likely that the Celtics could have essentially mailed in the final week of the regular season, resting Garnett as well as Paul Pierce and Ray Allen for the playoff run, without fear of losing homecourt advantage. Now, it appears that Boston will have to choose one or the other.