This game was played on Saturday. I was watching college ball all day and had designs to catch what I figured would be an easy win against the 5-52 Nets on DVR, perhaps zooming through once the game got out of hand. But I saw the score on ESPN's college hoops telecast, and quickly decided I didn't want to watch.
I checked out the box score and couldn't really figure out what went wrong. Twenty-six for Kevin Garnett. Seventeen assists for Rajon Rondo. A 50% to 44% edge in field goal shooting. Eighteen turnovers, but we always turn it over a lot and NJ coughed it up 15 times, too. Nothing out of the ordinary. How'd we lose?
Then I saw the free throw discrepancy. New Jersey made 34 of 41 from the charity stripe. We made nine of 11.
That kind of discrepancy is basically unheard of in the NBA, and I had resolved myself to watch it, expecting to see flagrantly bad officiating. Before I did, though, I checked in with the community over at Celtics Blog to see their reaction. Hardly any of the 300+ comments bitched about the officiating, and the ones that did were swiftly rebuked by comments that Jersey deserved most of that huge advantage. The word was that we didn't show much effort at all. Good enough for me. With plenty of other things to do, I don't need to watch my favorite sports team mail it in in a humiliating loss.
A new low? I dunno. Stuff like this happens in an 82-game NBA season. The 1995-1996 Bulls, on their way to a record 72 regular season wins, stumbled against a Toronto team that finished 21-61. (Granted, these Nets stand to be historically bad, a distinction those Raptors comfortably avoided.) Frankly, had things been going better of late, we're probably shrugging this one off as opposed to being discouraged by it. Indeed, the main effect it has seemed to have is to alert the general basketball-watching public to the Celtics' struggles -- which followers of the team have been aware of for a while.
Anyway, we'll see where it goes from here. I'm sort of sick of declaring certain performances watershed moments for this team, but perhaps losing to maybe the worst team in NBA history will solve some of our mindset problems. Our attitude -- whether it's overconfidence, a locker room thing, or that we're just bored -- is only part of the problem (age, injury, and performance are to blame, too), but it clearly needs fixing.
Boston's back in action Tuesday night against Detroit. Paul Pierce should be back; Kendrick Perkins is likely to miss the game with, I think, some sort of illness.
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