C's cut down to size: Out-glassed again in brutal defeat

["Stephen Beauregard" <sb@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

C's cut down to size: Out-glassed again in brutal defeat
By Steve Bulpett
Thursday, November 20, 2003

Following last night's game between the Celtics and New Orleans, Springfield
called for the tape. Not the Hall of Fame in Springfield, the YMCA.

     The Hornets emerged from the primordial ooze with an 81-73 win. The
totals would have been higher if the ghost of Dr. Naismith didn't have to
climb a ladder and take the ball out of the peach basket after every score.

     The winning team shot 36.6 percent from the floor. The winning team.

     The Celtics have no one to blame but themselves for this one. After
giving up a total of 36 offensive rebounds and 34 second-chance points in
their previous two games, they picked up right where they let down. The
Hornets out-glassed the C's 50-31 overall (24-8 on the offensive end), and had
22 extra-chance points.

     Jim O'Brien refused to question his team's toughness, saying the Hornets
were just larger and stronger in the individual matchups. But Paul Pierce
[news] wasn't having any of that.

     ``It's never a size issue,'' the captain said. ``I mean, Muhammad Ali
beat Sonny Liston. He beat George Foreman. It's never a size issue, man. It's
about mental toughness and knowing what has to be done.''

     New Orleans guard and former Celt David Wesley shook his head.

     ``I don't want to say they're not tough enough,'' he said. ``We've got to
play them again.''

     Playing their second game in two nights after a rough affair in New
Jersey, the Hornets figured to be off their game a bit. And they were. But
thanks to the Celtics, it didn't really matter. The visitors turned the ball
over 23 times, but the C's gave it away 23.

     At the half, New Orleans had as many rebounds as the Celtics had points
(31). Overall they took 18 more shots from the floor and seven more from the
line. It is, thus, most amazing the Celts stayed within eight.

     ``What did somebody say once? I'm too old to cry and it hurts too much to
laugh,'' O'Brien said as he entered the room for his postgame chat.

     ``It's frustrating,'' Pierce said after a game-high 23 points. ``It's one
of the more frustrating things you can go through, because when you know you
can stop a team and they get offensive rebounds. . . . I just call that a
hustle stat. When they kill you on hustle stats like that, then it hurts the
morale of the ballclub. I mean, you work so hard for 15 or 20 seconds on
defense and then you give up an offensive rebound and then you've got to work
15-20 seconds more just to get the ball back.

     ``It's nothing you can do physically,'' he said of the rebounding
solution. ``I mean, you can drill rebounds, you can do jumping jacks all day,
you can jump rope . . . it's all about mental toughness and physical
toughness. It comes from inside.''

     Strangely enough, all this painful Celtics introspection might not have
been necessary. This was, after all, still very much a ballgame in the last
quarter.

     But after Marcus Banks [news] drove to slice the margin to 61-59, the C's
went scoreless for the next 3:43, missing two shots and turning the ball over
four times as the Hornets ran their lead back out to eight. With the way the
Celts were going, that was cushion enough.

     ``When you challenge 45 percent of another team's shots and hold them to
under 37 percent (shooting) and turn them over 22 times, you expect to win,''
said O'Brien, adding later of the glass matter, ``I don't think `manhandled'
is too strong of a phrase. That's what happened. There's no other way around
it.''
Thanks,

Steve
sb@xxxxxxxxxxxx