Boston 99, Washington 88

[recap] [box score]

Boston was relatively flat for most of the night, but one look at the box score reveals good news for Boston fans: a 25-10 fourth quarter (on the road) and an 11-point win (going away).

The last period had been something of a bugaboo for the team during its recent three-game losing streak. Boston blew double-digit fourth quarter leads in Orlando on Thursday and against Los Angeles on Sunday, and let Atlanta pull away from them over the final 12 minutes on Friday. So holding a team to two made field goals against 16 misses -- even the lowly Wizards -- in the final period is a nice thing to see.

It's even more encouraging, depending on how you look at it, when you consider that the Celtics played the whole quarter without Paul Pierce, who injured his foot in the first quarter. Pierce returned to play parts of the second and third, but apparently Doc wanted to be careful. Hopefully he'll be back for Wednesday night in Miami.

Time for a mini-rant about officiating:

You're playing against the Boston Celtics, so you're not going to get a lot of calls. KG's going to set illegal screens; they're not going to be called. That's just part of the game. -- Brendan Haywood, via the Daily Dime

My timing might be a little unfair to Haywood, as I thought last night's officiating, if it favored anyone, favored the Celtics. But the moving screen comment addresses something that's been on my mind for a while, but which I didn't want to bring up because I didn't want anyone to think I was blaming refereeing for our struggles.

In this day and age, moving screens are a way of life in the NBA. Everyone sets them. You can probably spot one, and perhaps several, on every offensive set run by any team in any game on any night. What motivates officials to whistle one while letting dozens of others go remains something of a mystery to me. The obviously violent ones tend to get called; other than those, you're kind of rolling the dice.

Without hard statistics to back it up, this may seem a lot like whining (and maybe it is), but I maintain that we get called for more moving screens than any other team in the league. I know we play physically and that all of our barking at officials makes us less popular with them, but I think it's a bit dubious to think that we set meaningfully more illegal picks than our opponents. I'm not complaining about the ones where Glen Davis goes up and hits the guy (rather than stopping and letting the defender run into him), like he did so often last year. I'm talking the garden variety high screens that you see on every play. Those calls should be distributed evenly across both teams.

I'm going to try and keep track the rest of the season to see if I'm right or if it's just selective memory. I will say that I think it's a little ironic that Haywood is complaining, because his teammate, Antawn Jamison, got away with a handful of the most egregious bad screens you'll ever see last night.