Celtics win in 5 games I'm pretty sure. As for tonight's game, I predict Celtics 99-90 Heat GO CELTICS!!!
celtics win in 7 but they are so battered and bruised that they get swept in the second round by the cavs
Game 2 was easier that I thought it would be lol. Boston Celtics 106 - 77 Miami Heat Davis fills in for Garnett as Celtics take 2-0 series lead So many times this season, the Boston Celtics have tapped into their considerable well of defensive fortitude and crushed teams for five, six minutes at a time. So many times they have dominated for the length of basketball's version of a sprint. So many times they would those games won had they done a single thing. Sustain. For what seemed like the first time in months, the Celtics used a huge 21-0 second-quarter run as a catalyst for stamping out the hopes of the challengers. With a 16-point lead at the break, the Celtics only needed another six minutes to go up 30 and send the Miami Heat packing. The final tally: a 41-8 run between the second and third quarters, and a 106-77 victory, giving Boston the 2-0 series lead. "Their crowd got into it and they kept rolling," Dwyane Wade said. "You could feel it leaving and going fast. That's not a good feeling, not at all." For once, the Celtics looked like their own particular brand of vintage -- say, a nice '08 -- in combining back-to-back quarters of demoralizing defense. Call it dominant, call it an Omega Swarm, call it whatever adjective you will, but the fact remains that in a season which has seen countless opponents -- featuring inferior talent -- stand defiant in Boston, the Celtics' defense won the war of the mind. "It felt like a two quarter drought," Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said. "After we missed eight or nine straight, that's where we lost it." Afterwards, Celtics coach Doc Rivers said that the run was probably the best 16-minute stretch his team has played all season. Not to mention that Boston was without it's best defender in Kevin Garnett. With Garnett suspended for throwing an elbow at Quentin Richardson in Game 1, Rivers had to make a decision between starting an offensively inconsistent Glen Davis or the disappointment of Rasheed Wallace. Rivers chose Davis and the rest was, well, a really good performance. "The pick and roll game required a lot of rotation from both bigs," Rivers said. "You need one of your bigs to have great speed. Not having Kevin, you needed [Davis]." Davis finished with 23 points -- despite being blocked five times -- and eight rebounds, but most impressive were his 11 free-throw attempts. While Davis was hampering Wade into giving up the ball on screen-rolls, he also forced the Heat to respect his offense with consistent tenacity. "[Davis] was the difference in this game," Wade said. "We have to have somebody that's going to match that intensity and that energy if we're going to win." And once the defense started playing Davis straight up, that opened up the left corner for Ray Allen (25 points); a corner that was Allen's Alley as he hit five third-quarter 3s, almost all from the same spot. But the 3s were only the final Boston charge before the Heat were completely engulfed. It was the defense that fanned the flames during the run, a defense that held supposed Wade cohorts Michael Beasley and Jermaine O'Neal to a combined 7-of-24, or kept Miami to a season-low 20 points in the paint -- 17 below their season average. "We understand that Wade is such a great player and has been in big playoff games and he is going to be having the ball in his hands 90 percent of the time," Paul Pierce said. "It's going to be almost impossible to stop him from getting 20 shots, 30 points, so the eky is limiting these other guys." So, as predicted, Wade got his 29 on 18 shots, but those other guys, the rest of the Heat, made just 18 field goals, shooting 31 percent. The Celtics had shown flashed of that defense before this year, but those efforts had always been derailed by a tendency to allow untimely offensive rebounds to harder-working opponents, and an inability to complete defensive possessions by securing the ball. Once one of the top rebounding teams in the league, the Celtics suffered the greatest fall in rebounding stats of any squad, dropping to 13th and 29th in offensive and defensive rebounding percentages, respectively. For whatever reason, the Celtics shook their standings in those categories -- though this can rationally be explained by them finally having a cohesive effort in the area -- and allowed a mere six offensive ballboards, two off Boston's season low, with a total rebounding margin of 50-33. "It was our number one focus going into the game tonight, that we had to be dominant -- not good -- we had to have a dominant effort on the glass," Rivers said. It's always premature to determine the fate of a series after two games, before one team has even had a chance to play at home. But Tuesday night, the Heat were so thoroughly beaten by the Celtics, so clearly exposed for being a one-man team, that's its tough to give them much of a chance barring some incredible individual adjustments. That is, as long as Boston's recent propensity for sustaining elite-level play holds strong. "We can't focus on what the series is right now," Rivers said. "We haven't been good at that. We have not been. It will be a good test for us."
