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The Cavs and Celtics will now play best-of-three following another superior defensive performance by the Cavaliers in 88-77 win to even the series at 2-2.

Daniel Gibson had 14 points and a playoff-career-high six rebounds. Joe Smith had eight points and six rebounds
Wally Szczerbiak hit six of his first nine shots on the way to 14 points.

Varejao guarded Kevin Garnett for much of the second half and did it one-on-one most of the time and stayed in front of him on rebound attempts. Garnett shot just 1-of-7 and got just two rebounds after halftime. Anderson Varejao made 6 of 8 shots down the stretch.
– Anderson Varejao and Wally Szczerbiak were huge parts of the victory.Who figured “Pele” to miss only two of eight shots, even sticking the mid-range jumpers that make you (you know this is true) scream in your wine-and-cold-wrapped heart, “No! No!” Szczerbiak nailed four straight jumpers, three on LeBron James’ assists, to keep the Cavs from falling into their usual third-quarter funk.

– Chir Sheridan on Lebron James dunk over Kevin Garnett, We’ve seen dunks like that out of him before, but did you see LeBron James’ face afterward? Did you see that grimace? That glare?

It was a Baddest Man on the Planet scowl that James wore on his 23-year-old face Monday night after throwing down one of the more vicious dunks that Kevin Garnett has ever been on the receiving end of.

First, James got freed by a pick and blew past Paul Pierce. Next, he made the subtlest little head fake to get James Posey leaning the wrong way, and finally, he went up over Garnett and was undeterred by the two hands KG shoved into his chest as he rose higher and higher and ultimately unleashed a windmill flush that brought the house down.

– Doc River Witnessing the dunk,
“He can dunk. And if you give him a running start at the basket, he’s going to get a good dunk. Once he gets up there, there’s not a lot you can do about it,” Boston coach Doc Rivers said.

– Lebron James gift to the fans,
“That was the play we needed as a team,” James said. “Me as an individual hadn’t had a play like that, our crowd hadn’t seen a play like that since the alley-oop Daniel Gibson threw to me in the first series. They deserved it, our fans deserved it, they were great, and it was great that I was able to give it to them.”

– Ever since a Game 3 loss at Atlanta in the first round of the playoffs, the Celtics’ swagger, poise and big road wins have become a thing of the past. In fact, Boston’s last road win was nearly a month ago: April 14 in New York.

“It’s pretty frustrating,”  said Kevin Garnett, who scored just two of his 15 points in the second half, including none in the final quarter. “We had put ourselves in a position to win the game. We just couldn’t make our shots in the fourth.”

Instead, they bowed to the player known just about everywhere as “The King”

– Doc River on Lebron struggles in this series,
“You think LeBron is struggling?” Celtics coach Doc Rivers said to one questioner trying to push that theory. “He had 21 points, 13 assists, six rebounds. He probably forced 15 fouls. We don’t look at that as LeBron struggling. You only look at field goal percentage, but we don’t. We look at the way he’s playing his total game and making plays. The (other) 3s don’t happen without LeBron James.”

Expect to see a different Lebron James tonight when the Cavaliers face the Celtics for game 3 of the East semi finals.

Lebron James set records of ineffectiveness the past two games.

He shot 8-for-42 and his19-percent average is the worst for the first two games of a series by a player with 30 attempts since Joe Fulks shot 17.6 percent in 1948 with the Philadelphia Warriors.

And it is the worst of any two consecutive playoff games by a player attempting 40 shots since Tom Heinsohn was 8-for-41 in 1961 with Boston.

Coach Mike Brown has pointed back at James and told him to be more aggressive, to stop hesitating.

“There are times when he’s wide open, and you can’t be in this league and be wide open and not want to take those shots,” Brown said. “He’s got to keep stepping in and taking them.

“If he’s open, I want him to take the shot. I could sit here and say, ‘I want you to attack the rim on every possession.’ That’s easy and the right thing to say. But if he’s open, which he was in Game 2, he’s got to step up and shoot it without hesitating or thinking about the shot at all.

“And if he misses five in a row, I want him to take the sixth one the next time down.”

“I think LeBron is surprising himself,” forward Wally Szczerbiak said. “I don’t think he’s ever had two games like this. But the poor guy’s got so much on his shoulders. He’s got to carry the weight of the team, the weight of the offense, and he’s got everyone pointing fingers at him and trying to stop him.”

Game 3 bullets:

– If James wants to find the root of his problems, he should turn his focus toward Joe Johnson. It was the star guard’s scoring surge in Atlanta’s first-round series, after all, that forced the C’s to alter their defensive approach, which has since transferred to James.

Ray Allen said the Celtics are in “familiar territory” after keying their defense on Johnson to vanquish the upstart Hawks.

“We spent a lot of days on pick-and-rolls at the top of the key,” he said. “Atlanta used Michael Bibby a lot, so it put (Rajon) Rondo in the screens and he and I both in the screens, and we hadn’t done that all year, so now we kind of know what to expect and, most importantly, the bigs behind are in the same situations. So we talk about what we did in Atlanta, we’re now doing here with LeBron, so we’re in familiar territory.”

– The return home worked for the Atlanta Hawks in the first round, and the Cavs are hoping a similar turnaround is in the cards for them.

“We will have our crowd on our side, which will be nice,” Wally Szczerbiak said. “Hopefully our energy will be a lot better, and hopefully we’ll get more loose balls.”

Not to mention a little home support.

“Homecourt has always been good for us,” LeBron James said. “So we’re going to use the crowd, and we just have to continue to keep our heads up on offense.”

– Experience is in favor of the cavaliers
Guard Daniel Gibson said that experience against the Pistons will help the Cavs against the Celtics.

”If you haven’t been in this situation before, you might be a little bit discouraged the way things are going, but knowing the series isn’t over until a team wins four games and knowing that you’ve been in that situation before and done it before, that’s a great factor in relying on that experience,” he said.

Brown said the playoff experience the team has gleaned in the past couple of seasons should help, also.

”If you can have that kind of experience of what we went through last year and what we went through the year before, I think it will help out,” he said. ”And the one thing it does for our team, truly does for our team, is tell us that no series is over until someone has won four games.”

– Idea from The Painted Area, D’Antoni in Cleveland

As much talk as there is about whether D’Antoni is the best fit in Chicago or Toronto or New York or Dallas, doesn’t he actually make the most sense in Cleveland? Is there any team that *needs* to be relentlessly fast breaking more than the Cavs?

Yeah, sure, they’d still need the right point guard to make it go, but when you have possibly the greatest fast-break finisher in basketball history, I say you’ve got a pretty decent building block to start with.

Idea from CavsNews to Danny Ferry and Gilbert, hire D’Antoni as a head coach and Mike Brown as defense specialist.

Think about it, D’Antoni is “offensive genius” as Lebron James said. Combine that with defense and you will have a fun and killer team that will dominate for years.

Ben Wallace might miss game 3 against Boston because of left inner ear infection and allergies.

Wallace played 4 minutes last Thursday night before he became dizzy and asked to come out.

If Wallace can’t play tomorrow, Anderson Varejao would likely to start.

LeBron James is robbed in MVP voting

 Nobody is questioning if Kobe was deserving of the recent MVP award. Kobe has been a fantastic player for years, and was almost always deserving of the MVP.  

The only question becomes, did LeBron deserve to get fourth place in the voting?

Allergies force Cleveland Cavaliers Ben Wallace to miss most of the game

Cavaliers forward-center Ben Wallace left the court with about eight minutes left in the first quarter of Game 2 on Thurs day night because of pain and dizzi ness.

Wallace’s pain was so severe that he had to lay down across several chairs on the bench for relief. It appeared he was hit in the face during the game, but Wallace said his problems were from allergies.

Cavaliers are doomed without LeBron’s scoring

The Cavs started Game 2 on Thursday night like they knew what to do. They scored 24 points in the first quarter and moved the ball well. But in the next three quarters, they scored 12, 15 and 22 for a grand total of 49. During that offensive outburst, they pretty much looked overmatched.

For some reason, they started standing around – and standing around and trying to run pick-and-roll after pick-and-roll doesn’t work against a team as good as the Celtics.

As for James, remember all those promises he would not have two bad games in a row?

Time to do a YouTube search of Roseanne Roseannadanna and listen to her saying “nevermind.”

Celtics dominate Cavaliers to take 2-0 lead

Paul Pierce scored 19 points and Boston’s defense was again dominant as the Celtics beat the Cleveland Cavaliers 89-73 in the National Basketball Association playoffs.

Thursday’s victory gave the Celtics a 2-0 lead in the best-of-seven Eastern Conference semi-final series.

“It was a total team effort,” Pierce said. “We kept the turnovers down, we rebounded the ball, we made the extra pass and then we got the job done defensively. That’s true Celtic basketball right there.”

James, Cavs can’t find touch

“I’m a little shocked that he’s 8-for-42, but this is what we work on. We work on trying to contain him,” said Pierce, who was 2-for-14 in Game 1. “LeBron is what makes them go. And if we can somehow control him, we control their team. And with the help of the guys around me, we’ve been able to do that.”

 

 

After reviewing the game video, Cavaliers coach Mike Brown said some of the team’s standard offensive principles of ball movement and of general rotation broke down in the 76-72 loss in Game 1.

Cleveland Cavaliers LeBron James has history of rebounding from bad games

King James human after all

LeBron James emerged from the trainer’s room, headphones on his ears, to face the music. Well, not the music, exactly. But to face what has become a commonplace battery of television cameras, microphones and reporters’ notebooks that surrounded his locker and left barely enough room for the big man to stand

This was before his Cleveland Cavaliers took the court against the Celtics last night in Game 1 of the Eastern Conference semifinals.

Afterward, he had plenty more questions to answer following what was arguably, especially considering the circumstances, the ugliest game of his brilliant career.

Don’t expect to see a repeat of game 1 in the Cavaliers Vs. Boston series

1) Kevin Garnett can get his shot whenever he wants. And unlike so many times in his career when he deferred at the expense of taking over a game, he might like the taste he got in Game 1.

2) Garnett doesn’t have to cover Ben Wallace. No opposing big man does. But Garnett isn’t just any opposing big man on defense.

3) Ray Allen’s shooting slump won’t last seven games even if the Cavs do.

4) Two of the Boston Three Party aren’t likely to bomb on the same night again.

5) Rajon Rondo and Sam Cassell. This is like trying to hit a knuckleball after facing a 95 mph fastball. Just shy of his 65th birthday, Cassell not only still looks for his shot but can make it.