First of all, I love this picture of Paul Pierce. It's half-wink and half-scowl. It's a cute way of being a bad ass. As the Celtics were toying with the New Jersey Nets (no Posey or Rondo tonight) I saw a great stat on the Comcast broacast. I'll call them the five reasons we're going to win the title:
- Lowest Opponents PPG
- Lowest Opponents FG %
- Lowest Opponents 3 FG%
- Fewest Fast Break Points
- Fewest Points in the Paint
The defensive dominance of this team is staggering. As I've heard a billion times over the past few weeks, it's a different game come playoff time. Well is any team better suited for playoff basketball than the Celtics? We can defend. Full-court and half-court. We can bang (Perk, Powe, PJ and Big-Baby) and play perimeter D. We can score on the break (Rondo) and perimeter (Ray, House, Pierce). We can score on the block (KG and Pierce). What can't this team do?
And in one of the longest columns in the history of the internet, Bill Simmons has picked KG for MVP. Here's a snippet:
On May 22, professional basketball was effectively murdered in Boston. Garnett transformed every single facet of the franchise upon his arrival, from playing for the Celtics to coaching them to following them to owning them to working for them. What he did can't be measured by statistics; it can't even be measured in a few paragraphs like the section you're reading right now. It would belittle what he did. He transformed the culture of the team. He taught everyone to care about defense, to care about practice, to care about being a professional, to care about leaving everything they had on the court, to stop caring about stats and start caring about wins. He single-handedly transformed the careers of three young players (Rajon Rondo, Leon Powe and Kendrick Perkins), one veteran (Pierce) and one coach (Doc Rivers), all five of whom could have gone the other way. He played every exhibition game like it was the seventh game of the Finals.
Oh yeah, I almost forgot about tonight's call-in show from 10-10:30PM.
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