The Celtics battled two things all game Wednesday night (in addition to the Sixers): poor shooting and the officiating.
To the former point, you could tell from the get-go it was just one of those nights. Several early shots -- particularly off the fingertips of Paul Pierce -- rattled in and out, and after serious foul trouble hitting the starting unit and the bench came out cold*, it was only the excellence of Ray Allen that allowed the Cs to score even the 38 points they did score in the first half. The team got it going for brief stretches in the second half, but shot 38.8 percent from the floor for the game -- which I'm fairly sure is a season low.
To the latter point -- the officiating -- the box score doesn't tell the entire story. Philadelphia had 31 free throw attempts to Boston's 21, but until the late stages of the game, the discrepancy was much larger. In fact, the Celtics shot the game's final 12 free throws, which means that after Tony Battie missed an and-one with 4:48 remaining in the game, the Sixers had taken 31 shots from the line to Boston's nine. Some of that differential was justified, but it's a peculiar circumstance, indeed, where one team deserves 22 more free throw attempts than its opponent.
For their part, the Celtics did a nice job down the stretch of forcing the refs to give Boston the calls they had been giving Philly all night. The officials had been calling it close, and the Celts really looked to create contact in the final five minutes or so. After the aforementioned Battie miss it was 74-70, Sixers; Boston closed on a 14-6 run, getting ten points from the line. (The two lone misses from the line in the waning moments came courtesy of Shaquille O'Neal. I was surprised to see him in the game late for precisely this reason, and even more surprised to see the team use him in the screen-and-roll on a couple of late possessions.)
Boston won this game because of excellent defense and because of a champion's knack for winning close games on its less-than-great nights -- the second time in a couple of weeks Boston's pulled this latter trick on Philadelphia. Of course, so many of these games went the other way last season, and it was around this time that last year's regular season started to become disappointing. I heard tonight that Boston is now 94-14 in pre-Christmas games over the past four seasons. The post-Christmas (well, post-pre-Christmas) portion of the schedule begins Saturday, and it says here that Boston continues its winning ways in January and beyond.
*To be fair to the bench, they actually played pretty well -- other than scoring. Glen Davis shot 2-for-9 but had seven rebounds; Marquis Daniels shot 2-for-7 but had four boards and five assists. Semih Erden grabbed five boards. Von Wafer actually hit a couple of shots, and Avery Bradley had a big steal and basket early in the second quarter. Pressed into a little bit of extra duty as three starters were hit with three fouls apiece in the first half, the second unit held things together -- especially on the defensive end -- to keep the game winnable.
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