Celtics Return The Favor With 87-86 Victory Over Lakers

Let me start of by being  blunt. Lakers fan, don’t fool yourself into believing this game meant nothing. I know you went to sleep last night saying, “yah but we didn’t have Kobe.” But, that just wasn’t enough for you. This loss still bothered you. You deep down want to think that for the rest of the season you can hang  your hat on that you didn’t have Kobe in this game. In reality, you are scared of what went on last night.

In last nights game, the Celtics pushed and shoved around the soft Lakers, and LA didn’t like it. Lakers fan, what you saw in the first half made you nervous. You saw the exact same Celtics team that beat you less than 2 years ago in the NBA Finals. Thats right, the Boston Celtics who moved the ball well, and played with loads of passion. The Celtics were more aggresive, intelligent, and gritty with the way they went about things.

I know you want to lull yourself into believing Ron Artest is going to make your team tough. Ron Artest is not going to make Pau Gasol or Andrew Bynum any tougher in the post. Perkins can have a field day with Bynum because Bynum just wants someone who will stand in front of him and allow him to shoot an unchallenged hook shot. Not going to happen against Perk.

Now that I got that out of the way, onto the game. The Celtics played perfect basketball for every second that Rasheed Wallace was not in the game. You will hear a rant by Brandon later about him. Sheed finished the night 2-11 with 4 points and 1 technical foul. His hustle was zero, and his defense was less than zero. For a guy who says things along the lines of, “Our goal is to win the championship,” and, “This is when the boys go home and the men come out to play (not his exact words)” he could have had me fooled. It wasn’t by coincidence the Lakers made a come back every time he was in the game.

As for the high point in this game, it was Ray Allen. Like I said in my post “Ray Allen – You Aren’t Going Anywhere“, Ray looked much more relaxed and at ease with playing the game the way he loves to play it. He hit big shot after big shot, and put in 24 points on 10-15 shooting and 4-6 from behind the arc. I  noticed a few times last night where Ray would have taken an out of rhythm shot before today, but chose to pass it up tonight, instead. Great work by Ray, and I think this is just the start of big things for him.
Oh and he also had a little showing off to do (on wanna be slam dunk champion Shannon Brown):

This was a big win for the Celtics but they can’t celebrate it too long as they head right to Portland to play the Trailblazers  tonight at the Rose Garden, which is always a tough place to play. 2-0 so far on the road trip as the C’s take it game by game. The C’s are starting to come around and show the true identity as the season fires up and heads toward the playoffs.

(Photo by Noah Graham/NBAE via Getty Images) / (Photo by Andrew D. Bernstein/NBAE via Getty Images)