Celts Whack Sixers: Boston 100-Philadelphia 83

[wfcooper@tiac.com (Bill Cooper)]

	For disciplinary reasons, Larry Brown decided to sit Allen
Iverson for this game (apparently he decided to skip practice,
yesterday).  The Celts took advantage of the situation with their
pressing defense, causing the 6'ers to commit 29 turnovers.  Bruce
Bowen got the start, tonight in place of Ron Mercer.

	I know that it seems that I say this about every game, but
this one really did start out slowly.  The score stood at 7-6 in favor
of the Celtics 6:00 into the game.  The Celts got a nice infusion of
offense in the unlikely form of Andrew Declercq, who came in and
scored 6 points in about 3 minutes (in a game like this that's a big
deal).  The Celts built a 15-10 lead off a huge jam by John Thomas of
a missed Tyus Edney layup.  The Sixers closed to within a point at the
end of the quarter, 19-18.

	The Celts started off the second quarter with the full court
press (in response to Rex Walters assuming the point guard
responsibilities).  They used a 9-2 run to jump out to a 28-20 lead.
The Sixers, who were initially very passive in approaching the press,
began to attack and pulled to within 1 point at 34-33.  Pitino went
into a variation on the rope-a-dope for the remainder of the period,
playing the far end of his bench over the last 5 minutes of the half.
The Celts held their ground, while the starters were on the bench as
they took a 41-39 lead into halftime.

	After resting the starters in the latter stages of the second
quarter, I (and Tommy H.) thought that the Celts would start the third
quarter with ferocious pressure and just blow the Sixers out of the
Fleet Center.  Not so.  The C's did try to step up the pressure at the
start of the quarter, but the Sixers actually handled it pretty well,
beating the press and converting for easy hoops several times.  With
5:00 to go in the period, the Celts were up 52-49, and I was wondering
why the Celts couldn't put away the Sixers, at home minus Iverson.
Bruce Bowen came to the rescue of the Celts at this point, really
putting on a show of his all around fundamental skills, with blocks,
steals, dishes for easy shots, scoring etc.  Sparked by Bowen's strong
play, the Celts went on a 15-1 run to take a 67-50 lead and break the
game open.  by the end of the quarter the margin was up to 18 (73-55),
despite an Anthony Parker 50 footer at the end of the quarter.

	The Celts pushed their lead as high as 21 in the 4th period
(84-63).  John Thomas and Dante Jones got some extra playing time as
the Sixers surrendered with about 8 minutes to go.  The C's took the
win with a score of 100-83, which marked Rick Pitino's 100th as an NBA
coach.

	Really this game wasn't as close as the score makes it look.
As Tom Gorman remarked during the game, it's always a bad sign when
you have more turnovers than baskets, and the Sixers accomplished that
feat easily, with 29 turnovers, and just 24 hoops.  Meanwhile the
Celts had more steals than turnovers 16-15.  The Celts shot better
.440 to ..364 and had more rebounds  (46-38).  And they took more
shots (84-66).  The only reason the game was marginally close was that
the 6ers hit 6-11 on threes and 29-38 on free throws.  Plus, given the
number of turnovers the Celts caused they really should have shot
better than 44%.

Lineups: 
Celts: Billups, Bowen, McCarty, Walker, Ellison
Sixers: Overton, Stackhouse, Jackson, Weatherspoon, Montross

Players:
Bowen: You just can't say enough about Bowen's work this evening.  He
scored 10 points, had 9 boards, 3 assists, 4 blocks and a steal.  In
the third quarter, when the Celts made their run, it seemed as though
he was involved in every positive play they made.  When he got
rebounds, he immediately looked up the court to advance the ball for
easy baskets.  He had a great drive and dish for Walker during the
run.  He blocked Stackhouse a couple of times 15 feet away from the
basket.  After the game Pitino basically said that he replaced Mercer
with Bowen to give Ron a chance to study Bowen's play.

Mercer: responded with a better statistical game.  Ironically he was
is the game, when Bowen supplied many of his heroics, and was in
several cases the recipient of Bowen's strong floor play.  Ron got a
lot of easy scores on the break and tallied 20 points (7-16).  He also
got to the free throw line 8 times.  He still is having trouble
getting his jumper of is situations where he has a good chance to
convert.

Walker: short minutes tonight (33).  He scored 17 (7-14), and had 8
boards, 3 steals and just 1 turnover (0 assists).  He was relatively
subdued tonight, and did not bear the brunt of the offense.

McCarty: Another improved offensive performance as he hit 5-10, for 12
points in his 32 minutes of playing time.  Also came up with 6
defensive boards, a nice sign for him.

Billups: Only shot 2-7 tonight, but I thought that his shots were
pretty good, just didn't drop.  Also had 6 assists and just 1
turnover.  Several nice drive and dish combo's and he actually ran a
pick and roll as one point in the 4th quarter!

Edney: 8 points and 5 assists in 12 minutes.  Pitino said that he
doesn't really like Edney's defense, which is apparently the reason he
doesn't play more (he made a specific comment about Edney not
generating many steals).

DeClercq: Maybe the most impressive thing was that Andrew played for
20 minutes and only picked up 3 fouls.  He was still aggressive
though, and collected 2 blocks, 2 steals and 7 boards (3 offensive) to
go with 6 points.  He did muff several fine passes from he teammates
or he would have had a strong offensive evening as well.  DeClercq is
very good on his second leap, i.e. he can jump very well after coming
down from a previous leap.  On one of his blocks tonight, he got faked
out, jumped up into the air, then came down and went right back up and
blocked the shot.

Minor: got 12 minutes but only shot 1-5.  As his defense has improved
he seems to have lost something on his jumper.

Thomas: got a career high 20 minutes,and showed some brief flashes.
He had a huge jam of an offensive rebound and a couple of nice moves
in the paint.  Scored 6 points, and had 4 rebounds and 4 assists (the
assists were mostly dumb luck, Thomas is no passer).

Barros: The leader of the mop up squad, he got 13 minutes, scored 6
(2-5), had 3 assists and 3 turnovers.  It seems to me that Pitino
plays Dana for about 5 minutes in every first half to see if this is
going to be one of the nights were Dana is on, and if he doesn't score
6 or 9 points quickly just forgets about him for the rest of the game.

Dante: Got 7 minutes of mop-up time and scored 4 points.

Knight: DNP of course, but I thought that I would mention that he
received a very back handed comment form Pitino, when Rick said that
the C's missed Travis much more than he (Pitino) had anticipated.

Coaching: This game featured the distribution of minutes, that I
thought we would see from the Celts all season long.  Only 2 players
had more than 30 minutes (Walker 33, McCarty 32) and all but one
player had at least 12.  Part of that was the margin of victory (I'm
sure that Walker would have had another 38 minutes night if the score
had been closer).  I wonder if the Detroit game wasn't a bit of a wake
up call for Rick:  Maybe he realized that he can't play people 40
minutes a night all season and expect them to put out the kind of
energy that he requires.

	On the Bowen/Mercer situation, despite whatever point that
Pitino was trying to make with Ron, it's worth pointing out that when
the Celts made their run, Bowen was playing the small forward spot and
Mercer was in the game at 2 guard.  Maybe Bowen is a little like Rick
Fox: He can play the 2 guard spot, but he's more comfortable and
productive at small forward.

The Celts record is now 10-12 (8-6 at home).  They travel to Toronto
for Wednesday nights game.

Bill Cooper
wfcooper@tiac.com