CLEVELAND — According to the schedule released by the league, the Celtics and Cavaliers are down to play a Game 5 in this first-round playoff series a week from tomorrow night.
The two key words that follow the listing are “if” and “necessary.”
That caveat may work just fine in other matchups, but as regards this particular duel, it may have been more honest if the league had used a different suffix.
“Ask the Cavs.”
It was abundantly clear here yesterday afternoon that this series will last as long as LeBron James and Kyrie Irving and their wine-and-gold-clad friends decide.
At halftime, the Celts were shooting 52.8 percent from the floor and had thrown 52 points at Cleveland, leading by as many as eight in the second quarter.
And for all of that, they still went into recess down eight points.
Seven and a half minutes later, they were down by 20. The final spread was a modest 13, but the hosts were in Heisman pose holding the Celts at bay from the second quarter on.
The bottom line is the Celtics can play to their full capacity — and even a little above their heads — and if the Cavaliers play with focus and effort, nothing the Bostonians can do will matter.
The C’s were still bold late yesterday.
“They’re a good team,” said Jae Crowder. “We know it. We know exactly what we have to do. But they’re not the best defensive team. They have holes in their defense, and we have to expose that. We have to get to the second and third options on a couple of play calls and not just focus on the first option.”
Isaiah Thomas pointed to the Celts’ 14 turnovers and the 20 points Cleveland derived from them.
“They’re very talented,” he said. “On top of them making tough shots, you can’t give them easy baskets. I think if we eliminate those, we can sneak one in Game 2.”
The Celts are good, better even than folks thought possible as they dribbled through a minefield of trades and the jettisoning of the two best players on their Opening Night roster. They can be counted on to play hard and, for the most part, extremely well.
And they will not toss their towel onto the court even when they fall far behind — a time when others would have rolled over and let things get further out of hand.
But all those admirable points are moot when Cleveland is getting 30 points from Kyrie Irving, 20 from LeBron and 19 from Kevin Love.
The Celtics can absorb all of Brad Stevens’ X and O artistry and run it to perfection on the hardwood canvas. But when LeBron James has the ball and stares you down, it’s a force of nature that, at its core, has no strategic counterbalance.
It reminds me of a conversation with Kevin McHale from years ago. We were discussing different styles of playing the game when he threw up a verbal stop sign.
“Let’s not go crazy here,” said McHale. “You know what wins? Having better players.
“People used to talk about how we played back in the ’80s, but the reason we won is that we were just a lot better than almost everyone else. We threw Birdie (Larry Bird), Chief (Robert Parish), DJ (Dennis Johnson), me and Danny (Ainge) out there, and we knew going into every game that we were going to be better at three or four or sometimes even all five positions.
“That’s how you win. Get better players.”
Coaching can tighten a huge talent gap and it can be a critical edge when teams are evenly matched.
But we know now what we knew before this even began. Cleveland has a better basketball team than the Celtics right now.
Ainge even said as much to us recently: “My objective is to win championships, and we’re a long way from that.”
You could argue that the Celtics might not even be in these playoffs had not the Cavaliers rested James and Love in the fourth quarter a week ago Friday and sat James, Love and Irving the entire afternoon in Boston last Sunday. Without those two wins, the C’s would have still made it in on a tiebreaker, but it might have changed the complexion of their final two games, the first of which was played last Tuesday against a DeMar DeRozan-less Toronto (they won by a whisker).
It was Cleveland that, at the very least, guided the Celtics into the seventh seed and its line of fire.
And it will be Cleveland that will let everyone know when it wants to move on.
The Celtics have the ability to sneak out with a victory if they can catch the Cavs in a coffee break. But as regards the overall result of this series, let us not, as McHale would say, go crazy.
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