I'm still in a minor state of shock from what I witnessed at the Garden on Sunday afternoon. Saturday I wrote that the Celtics had reached their high water mark of the season. But now they have taken it to a whole new level. Going into the game I was feeling cautiously optimistic Boston had a chance against Miami, but never in my wildest dreams did I imagine they were capable of handing the Heat a beating reminiscent of Game 6 of the 2008 Finals vs the Lakers. The Celts put it away in the 3rd quarter by outscoring Miami 31-12 (strangely enough the OKC Thunder, who look like the best team in the NBA right now, put up an identical 3rd quarter score on Sunday while blowing out the East's other top team, the Chicago Bulls), and held the Heat to just 28 total points in the second half.The 19 point margin was the worst defeat of the year for the Miami, and their 72 points scored and 34.8 FG% were also Heat season lows. Avery Bradley basically played Dwayne Wade to a draw, while also providing us with one of the best highlights of the year so far. Paul Pierce matched Lebron James basket for basket, although in the category of +/- Pierce was a very impressive +28, while Lebron was an embarrassingly bad -30. You read that right. Minus thirty. Not to mention the fact that for only the second time in his career, Lebron had zero assists. Kevin Garnett also locked down Chris Bosh, holding him to just four points on 2-11 shooting.
And then there was Rajon Rondo, who absolutely toyed with the Heat point guards while posting his 5th triple double of the season. Lebron doesn't have one yet this year. Neither does Wade. In fact nobody else in the NBA even has two, and the entire rest of the league put together has just nine. Think about this: Rondo has five triple doubles in 42 games played, that's one every 8.4 games, or 11.9% of the time. All the other starters in the league combined have 9 in roughly 7,800 games played, which is one every 867 games, or 0.115% of the time. Ridiculous.
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