Things got sloppy, they got ugly, and it wasn’t until the final minute, that the C’s pulled away for good.
They could have blamed the refs, they could have blamed those nebulous “basketball gods” and they could have blamed those cruel rims that sent far too many 17-foot jump shots bouncing away.
Or they could blame themselves.
“That was us,” coach Doc Rivers said after the Celtics’ 84-80 win. “We were not very good tonight — but we won the game. And that’s the only thing you’ll take from this game tonight, that we won the game.”
The 14th game of the Celtics’ month-long winning streak was probably the worst of them. The Celtics committed 23 fouls, they missed 49 shots, and they let the Sixers consistently outwork them on both ends. But an ugly win is still a win, and the Celtics earned this one in the end.
“Doc told us to grind through it both physically and mentally,” said Kevin Garnett, who had a key block on Andre Iguodala with 14 seconds left to seal the deal. “I felt like it was more just a mental grind, but we expected that. We were prepared for a dogfight — we don’t like them, but hey, we’ll suit up for them either way. I thought the last five or seven minutes, we just turned it on defensively and got in a rhythm on defense. That’s how we’ve been winning games, and tonight was no different.”
The game was especially taxing for Paul Pierce, who was a no-show in the first half and put the Celtics in a tough spot early. He missed all of his first seven shots, forcing Rivers to yank him from the game in the final minute before halftime in favor of Von Wafer. Wafer finished the first half with two points in one minute; Pierce had zero in 20.
The anger mounted for the Celtics’ captain, who got himself a technical foul in the third quarter.
“I got frustrated,” said Pierce, who recovered and finished with 11 points. “I know I was frustrated tonight, just in a game where you’re trying to get rhythm and the game is off balance and calls are being called each and every way. It was definitely frustrating tonight. Sometimes that happens — you let the refs get the best of you, and obviously that affected my play. But somehow, some way, we find a way to grind it out, come back to reality, and find a way to win.”
Last year, the Celtics lost a lot of games like this. Banged-up, demoralized, frustrated, the 2009-10 C’s might have given up and checked out early. No longer.
“We’re finding ways to win,” Pierce said. “Any kind of way. That just shows the versatility of this team this year. We’ve won games in the hundreds, we’ve won games in the eighties, and we’re just finding ways to grind it out. We don’t have healthy bodies, and we don’t know who’s going to be out there, night in and night out. We’ve got to win differently every night.
“Living and learning, man,” Garnett added. “We’re human, and we know we’re not perfect, but we’re striving. We work at this every day. I think we’ve got a deeper and better team, and a smarter team. A little more experience on this team. We pay attention to our past, and we try to learn and apply ourselves. Tonight was a great win for us.”
