Doing what great teams do?

One of the things that I remember, whether accurately or not, about the greatest basketball team that I ever watched regularly, the 1986 Boston Celtics, was the third quarter domination. It seemed to me at the time, and I see no reason to think that it wasn't true, that the team had a tendency to start the second half very strong, dominating the competition, and many times putting games away during the first half of the third quarter. A game would be competitive for a half, and then get out of hand quickly after halftime.

There are reasons for that phenomenon. It's hard to come out emotionally ready every night, and sometimes there's a feeling out process. Maybe the starters need a little while to get into the flow of the game. But after a half of play, everyone's starting the second half with their starters on the floor, both warmed up and rested, ready to go, and mentally ready to play. And the great teams, at least if my perception is correct, really shine in that situation. I noticed some of it from the 2007 Celtics, too, and assume that it existed for other great teams.

Whatever the case, it's certainly happened in the first three games for the 2009-2010 Celtics. They've played an excellent team on the road, a bad team at home and a decent team at home. In those games, they've outscored the opposition by a total of 67 points, 22 1/3 points per game. Nearly half of that differential, 33 points, was racked up in the first six minutes of the third quarter. Part of that is the 15-0 run that they put up against Charlotte, but they've outscored the opposition badly in the first 6 minutes of each third quarter.

Celtics - First three games

First 6 minutes, 3rd quarter			Game
	Points	PA	Difference	Points	PA	Difference
At Cleveland	13	7	6	95	89	6
vs. Charlotte	15	0	15	92	59	33
vs. Chicago	24	12	12	118	90	28

It's obviously ridiculously early to be drawing any conclusions. And one of the things that is true about great teams is that they've probably got a decent point differential at any subset of the game that you want to look at. That said, and let me emphasize that I've never looked at it closely or statistically, the beginning of the third quarter really looks to me like a time when great teams put games away.

I'll revisit as the season continues...

Boston Celtics, 2009-2010

A couple of idle thoughts as we wait for tip-off to the 2009-10 season...

• There are only a couple of people in the NBA for whom I would less like to root than Rasheed Wallace. That said, it reminds me of the Bill Walton acquisition in 1986. A team that already was a championship contender added a legitimately great NBA player to its bench, a player that is not only willing to accept a backup role and backup minutes, but excited to do so.



• IFF Kevin Garnett is healthy, this is the team to beat.



• One of the things that makes them formidable is their defense. They not only have players that can produce offense in crunch time, they've got players who can play lock-down defense while doing so.



• I expect great things from Rajon Rondo this season.



• I expect great things from Paul Pierce this season.



• I think we start this season with 2-3 teams in each conference with legitimage shots to win it all. In the East, that's Boston and Cleveland, with Orlando a possibility. But frankly, it would be surprising to me if the East weren't represented by the Cavaliers or the Celtics.

Prediction: Boston wins 65-68 games in the regular season, wins the East and wins the Celtics' 18th NBA Championship.

Mixed emotions

This causes very mixed emotions.

The Celtics pulled out all the stops when their campaign to sign free agent forward Rasheed Wallace started last week. And the tactics paid off as Wallace committed to sign with the Celtics, a league source said yesterday.

There's is not a single NBA player for whom I'm less inclined to root than Rasheed Wallace. I don't like him - I don't like his appearance, I don't like what I perceive as his personality, or his past behaviors. I don't want to root for Rasheed Wallace.

But.

I think he certainly makes the Celtics a better team. And I like to root for the Celtics.

Mixed emotions...

Halftime thought...

58-35

The Celtics are taking a 23 point lead into halftime. And all I'm thinking is, "if they should somehow lose this game, there's no way I'll be able to watch game 7..."

UPDATE: The lead is up to 29 after three. They've shown Celtics GM Danny Ainge several times, and you know that the clock cannot possibly run fast enough during this fourth quarter to suit him.

Boston Celtics 97 - Los Angeles Lakers 91

I won't deny it - I did not see the whole game last night. I watched most of the first half, but I saw little of the third quarter. I was doing other things, and missed the comeback in the third. When I checked in at 75-75, I stayed, so I saw the end of the game.

• There will be a lot of talk about the 18 point halftime lead, and the 57-33 second half. The comeback is even more impressive than those numbers make it sound. Over the first half of the 3rd quarter, the Lakers actually extended the lead. It was 70-50 with 6 minutes left in the third. When the quarter finally ended 6 minutes (of clock time - 35 minutes of real time) later, the Celtics trailed 73-71, as they put together a 21-3 run.


• There were a lot of people concerned about the Lakers comeback in game 2, cutting a 24 point lead to 2 before losing by 6. I was less concerned, because the Celtics had the lead in the middle of the fourth quarter, clearly let it affect the way they played, and when it got tight, they finished the job. I thought that the Celtics were the better team, and the Lakers comeback to make it close didn't change my opinion. Last night, the Lakers let the big lead change their approach, but when the Celtics cut it close, they weren't able to respond and put it away. The Celtics are a better team than the Lakers.


• Three related points:
  
  1. No team had ever trailed after the first quarter in an NBA Finals game by more than 20 points. It was an embarrassing moment for Celtics fans when the the first quarter ended, as they set a new record, trailing by 21.
  
  
  2. No team had ever won an NBA Finals game when trailing at halftime by more than 14 points. The embarrassment of point one was completely ameliorated (and then some) by the victory as they set an NBA Finals record for the largest halftime deficit (18) overcome for a win.
  
  
  3. No team has ever lost an NBA Finals after taking a three games to one lead in the series. People who are looking at that as evidence that the series is over should re-read points one and two (and meditate on the 2003 ALCS and the 2004 ALCS and the 2008 Super Bowl...)


• That said, it seems to me that the Celtics are clearly the better team. They have played the Lakers six times this season and won five of them. They are 3-0 in Boston and 2-1 in Los Angeles. They need to win one more game, and have three more chances to do it, two of them in Boston if necessary.


• I don't expect that it will be. At least some of the Lakers have, I suspect, subconciously or emotionally conceded at this point, and are going to have a hard time raising their game for the reward of two more cross-country flights and a loss in Boston. I fully expect Boston to win Sunday night.

66-16

The New Orleans Hornets almost set an NBA record this season. The 1998 San Antonio Spurs won 36 more games than the 1997 version. It was an exceptional circumstance, as the 1997 Spurs were a good team playing without their best player, and then ending up with the best player in the draft, a college senior who was ready to play in the NBA. Well, the Hornets won 38 more games this year than last, beating the Spurs NBA record for biggest one year turnaround. So why do I say that they "almost set" an NBA record?

Because the 2008 Celtics won 42 more than the 2007 Celtics. And that's going to be a very hard record to break. The 2007 Celtics won 24 games. Since the NBA went to an 82 game schedule in 1968, there have been 984 team-seasons. 109 have resulted in teams winning fewer than 25 games (and 11 of those came during the strike-truncated 50 game 1999 season.) The following season, those teams averaged 29 wins. It's hard to go from bad to good quickly in the NBA, because teams are so dependent on impact players, and impact players are hard to come by. And only about 10% of teams win fewer than 25 games. On the top end, the 2008 Celtics are only the 10th team in that period to win more than 65 games in a season, which is very hard to do. To break that record, a team that wins 24 games or fewer one year will have to win 67 or more the next year. That's unlikely to happen again any time soon...


UPDATE: OK, the New Orleans stuff is wrong. They weren't listed as New Orleans in 2007, and I missed it, so the spreadsheet was wrong. They didn't improve by 38 games this year...

Irony

The Boston Celtics are going to finish with the best record in the NBA. And they're going to finish the season with the greatest year-to-year increase in wins in NBA history. They're going to accomplish those things on the the strength of one of the best trios in the league, Garnett, Pierce and Allen.

And the irony is, they clinched those accomplishments last night in a game in which none of the three played...

60 wins

Over the last two seasons, the Boston Celtics won 58 games while losing 107. Last night, this year's Celtics team won its 60th game against only 15 defeats. Congratulations are due to Danny Ainge, who took a lot of abuse while he was accumulating the assets which turned into Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen. And to Doc Rivers, who took a lot of abuse for not winning more games with the unfortunate roster hand that he was dealt.

One more Celtic win or Piston loss guarantees the Celtics the home court advantage throughout the Eastern Conference playoffs. One more Celtic win or Hornet loss guarantees the home court advantage throughout the NBA playoffs. With seven games remaining, most against poor teams, it's safe to say that the Celtics are going to finish with the best record in the NBA.

Monday morning odds and ends...

• Dan Shaughnessy had a piece in the Globe yesterday arguing that the various Red Sox debacles (1978, 1986, 2003) were bigger disasters than Super Bowl XLII. The wounds are still too fresh for me to go into this fully, which I expect I'll do some day (probably in therapy) but let me briefly address Dan's point.
  
  Hogwash.
  
  There has never been a "collapse"/"choke"/"disaster"/"disappointment" to match it. Certainly not in Boston pro sports. Never. Not no way, not no how. Not when the stakes are considered. No comparison.



• An absolutely fantastic win for the Celtics yesterday, beating San Antonio without their starting power forward, starting center and backup center. I'd been looking forward to San Antonio as a measuring stick game, which it wasn't - there were too many important pieces missing on both sides - but it was a great win for the team anyway.



• Does Nancy Pelosi even realize how foolish she sounds?



• Sometime in the next couple of weeks, I'm going to put together a brief essay on Lewis' The Abolition Of Man and the apparently rapidly approaching end of Western Civilization in Great Britain. Here's a comment from The Way (which is the second of the three essays which makes up The Abolition of Man.):
  

  The practical result of education in the spirit of The Green Book must be the destruction of the society which accepts it.
  

  C.S. Lewis

  
  Lewis was a brilliant man, a great writer, a deep thinker, and something of a prophet...



• I'm torn on the Clinton campaign. There's part of me that thinks that the sooner she's gone, the better. The rest of me is pretty sure that McCain can beat her in November, while Obama is a) likely to be just as bad a President and b) far likelier to win. I think that the best case, for Republicans and people concerned about National security, is for Hillary to win at the convention on the basis of superdelegates, alienating the members of the Obama cult of personality.
  
  I certainly could be wrong (and I usually am) but that would, I think, make for quite an entertaining spectacle, and a fatally wounded candidate.



• Chris Lynch thinks that Curt Schilling's done. I wouldn't be surprised if he is, I wouldn't be surprised if made 10-12 starts after the All Star Game. If we've seen him for the last time, well, we saw great things from him.
  
  My concern is not that it leaves a big hole in the rotation, because I don't believe it does. But it leaves something of a hole, as I'm certain that they want to limit the innings of both Buccholz and Lester this year, and with Schilling gone, that will require more management. They remain, in my opinion, the best team in baseball, with or without him.

Happy Birthday...

to one of the all-time greats in the NBA, Larry Bird, who turns (hard to believe) 52 today, and gave me as much pleasure as a sports fan as anyone who ever played any game.