Post by FLCeltsFan on Mar 16, 2009 7:01:07 GMT -5
www.bostonherald.com/sports/basketball/celtics/view.bg?articleid=1158790&format=text
Celtics drop ball in defeat
Turnovers are costly vs. Bucks
By Steve Bulpett | Monday, March 16, 2009 | www.bostonherald.com | Boston Celtics
Photo by AP
MILWAUKEE - As the losses have accrued lately, it’s been easy to cut the Celtics [team stats] some slack. They’ve been beset by injuries and they’ve had difficulty fitting new players into the rotation.
Yet you always had to give them credit for giving maximum effort - until yesterday.
After an 86-77 loss to the Bucks, the Celtics went to Chicago. Coach Doc Rivers should have taken them to the woodshed for a little tough love.
Even without Kevin Garnett, the C’s could offer no plausible excuse for turning over the ball a season-high 25 times, or allowing an opponent-high 21 offensive rebounds.
“We can’t have a woe-is-me attitude because of the injuries,” Paul Pierce [stats] said. “We’ve got to go out there and keep fighting until these guys come back.”
Pierce was fighting himself all afternoon. He hit his first two shots from the field but missed 11 of his last 13. He was a Shaq-like 7-for-12 from the free throw line en route to 15 points, and turned over the ball seven times. The captain did pull down 11 rebounds, but he was, with most of his mates, a step behind.
“I just thought they won the 50-50 game all night,” Rivers said of the Bucks. “I thought they played harder. They got to all the loose balls.”
Making the day even more excruciating for the C’s was that the game was still there for the taking. The Bucks - without the injured Michael Redd and Andrew Bogut - were ahead by 11 with 4:30 left. But Kendrick Perkins [stats] then scored seven of his career-high 26 points in an 8-0 Celtics run that got the guests within three with 3:01 to go.
The rest of the game belonged to Milwaukee, however.
The C’s missed five shots - including one by Eddie House, who twisted his left ankle - and the Bucks scored the last six points. The key play came when Rajon Rondo [stats] knocked the ball away from Charlie Bell in the last minute. Luke Ridnour then got involved, and suddenly the rock was back in the hands of Bell, who spun and threw in a 3-pointer just before the shot clock expired.
“You know, I do believe in the basketball gods, and (the Bucks) were getting to everything loose,” Rivers said. “Bell grabs it and makes a shot. It’s because they wanted it.
“That’s the disappointing thing. When you play a team that’s desperate, you can’t come in and just show up. You’ve got to be willing to get dirty, too, and I didn’t think we did that overall. I thought we didn’t move the ball very well at all. Forget the turnovers, I just thought we decided that we were going to each win the game, and that’s something we never do. And we do, we lose.”
Ray Allen went 2-for-11 from the floor, and Rondo was 2-for-10, combining with Pierce to go 8-for-36. Only Perkins (9-for-16) allowed the Celts to shoot 37.7 percent from the floor overall.
“I just did my job, you know, finished around the rim, take the offensive glass,” the C’s center said. “It’s just that even when you have a good game like that it’s hard to even be happy about it when we take a loss. It really don’t even matter.”
It didn’t matter because, while the Bucks shot just 32.6 percent, their hustle got them 20 more attempts from the floor than the Celts, who lost for a third straight Sunday.
“A lot of that is just our effort,” Pierce said of the stat discrepancy. “Those are the things that go either way, and today it went their way all day. Those are the things that we can control.”
