"We took our eyes off of the process to start the game," Rivers said Sunday. "I told our guys that. I felt like we came into the game thinking, 'Let's throw some haymakers at them.' [So we took] quick shots, and 3s, and bad shots. No ball movement. We were thinking about ending the series instead of thinking about playing basketball first and then the results after."
The following day, Rivers' captain disagreed.
"I never won a game in the first quarter," Paul Pierce said Monday at the Celtics' training facility in Waltham, Mass. "Everybody has their different view of their game — the coach has their view, the player's going to have their view. I didn't see it like that."
But ball don't lie, as Rasheed Wallace famously says, and the way the Celtics played ball early Sunday afternoon exposed a lot of mental mistakes in their game. They rushed shots that they're normally too smart to take. They didn't move the ball. They watched Kevin Garnett, one of their veteran leaders, make a pile of early mistakes — a bad pass, a goaltend, a traveling violation. The Celtics are better than this, but only when they focus on fundamental basketball, not on maximizing their so-called "urgency."
"There was an urgency in Game 4," Rivers said Monday. "There's an urgency every night. The fact that we've played ourselves into the opportunity to do this is great, but after that, we've just go out and perform. We can't think about closing out, about winning it. We've got to think about playing basketball, and the other stuff will take care if itself."
The Celtics can glean a lot of positives from their Game 4 effort. Considering everything that went wrong — their poor execution to start the game, their miserable free-throw shooting down the stretch, the 46-point explosion from Dwyane Wade — they should be happy they even kept things close. Especially considering that even Wade's supporting cast started coming to life in Game 4 — Michael Beasley became an explosive offensive weapon at times, and Quentin Richardson was a big-time threat from outside. All that, and the C's still had a chance for a sweep.
"Even though we lost the game, we were in the game," Pierce said. "We had chances, man, to put it away. Obviously there were some late plays down the stretch. I recall a play where I let Beasley get an offensive rebound when we were down four, and of course there were some missed free throws. But we had our chances. So hopefully we are a lot better, especially in the first quarter, and we're more focused at home to close this thing out."
It would be nice to get this over with. It would be nice to have the rest of this week to rest. It would be nice to stay home in Boston, avoiding another flight back to Miami for a pressure-packed Game 6. If the Celtics don't win now, there could be trouble ahead. But the team is trying to avoid taking that approach.
"We're not even thinking about that," Garnett said. "We're just thinking about the next game, and taking care of home court, to be honest. We're not thinking about none of the above. If anything, we're thinking about how we lost yesterday and how we're trying to contain all their guys."
The mind-set is simple — no more dwelling on the past, no more looking ahead to the future. No more wondering about what could have been or what might be. Simply focus on the present.
"The world is all about what-ifs," Ray Allen said. "We all live in the realm of 'what if?' Now, this is what we're dealing with. We play [Tuesday], so we don't want to be in 'what if' forever. We want to control our destiny."
With a win in Game 5, the Celtics' destiny will be sealed. Round two awaits.
