Paul Pierce was in foul trouble and Ray Allen was ice cold, and if one of those stars had been able to contribute more, the Celtics probably would not have lost Game 3 by a 91-84 score. Yet that should be no excuse; a team should be able to overcome adversity in the NBA Finals.
The Celtics, however, could not. They fell behind 17 points, a deficit that should have never gotten that large to begin with. They chipped away, at one point cutting the lead to a single point, but they never cleared the hump. Part of that is because they were playing a championship-caliber team in the Lakers, but another part is that they never figured out how to win when playing from behind.
It's been well-documented (and even sometimes celebrated) that the Celtics simply did not take the regular season seriously. On talent alone, the Celtics are essentially good enough to win on any given night. But on other nights, it simply takes something more, and on Tuesday, the Celtics didn't have it.
Instead, they had Rasheed Wallace angrily inbounding a ball with one hand, like he was delivering a Roger Clemens fastball. They had Tony Allen spotting up from 20 feet and clanking one off the rim in a seven-point game. They had Pierce reverting back to 2000 Paul Pierce, driving the lane for an uncontested layup to pad his stats in a nine-point game with five seconds left. Worst of all, they had a team-wide moment of quit on Derek Fisher's dagger of a traditional three-point play.
"He's just a gutty, gritty player and he gutted the game out for them," Doc Rivers said of Fisher. "I thought Kobe was struggling a little bit, and Fisher — he basically took the game over."
For the Celtics, there was nobody to gut out a win. Kevin Garnett was by far the biggest contributor, but even after his 25-point, six-rebound performance, he knew that the Celtics lacked that extra something that they needed to come out on top.
"At the end of the day, it's about the wins, man," he said. "I care less about how I'm playing. I played like crap in Game 2 I thought, but [I] made some key finds and assists, got some key rebounds in that game, and we won. [In Game 3], I had a nice offensive flow, and we lost. I'll take Game 2 and how I played there and wins all day."
Garnett said it was a matter of execution in the fourth quarter.
"[We had] some small breakdowns at the end of the game, and against a team like this, you can't just do that," he said. "You gotta finish the game out, and you gotta finish it out solid."
The Celtics could not, and now they're tasked with overcoming history. Phil Jackson, of course, is 47-0 when leading teams to Game 1 victories, but teams that lose Game 3 of the Finals after the series is tied 1-1 are 0-10 since the introduction of the 2-3-2 format.
Yes, the referees were consistently terrible all night long. Yes, if the Celtics had even gotten five points out of Ray Allen, things would have been very different. But the fact remains that the Celtics played from behind for 41 minutes, and they could not figure out how to regain the lead.
That's partly because they had no blueprint.
