Only the most relentlessly optimistic among us expected to sweep Miami coming in.
It is, however, daunting to have seen the total lack of focus and effort this team opened the game with today - very similar to some of the dead efforts this club rolled out post-December.
Meanwhile, Cleveland looks very good today.
Good points. We lost this one in the first quarter, not the fourth.
Honestly, I thought the D on Wade in the fourth was actually pretty good. I mean - we can live with him shooting threes. Most games he won't hit them at that crazy kinda rate. And we'll win. For Miami, this was a perfect storm in the fourth. Bad free throw shooting for the Celtics, Wade shooting the lights out, Rondo missing a layup. It won't happen again.
But Cleveland is going to be a serious handful.
We did not lose this in the first. We lost when Wade started burying pull up 3's of the dribble, as you mention.
I don't think effort was a problem in the beginning. Q Rich shooting the lights out was the problem,combined with the bigger problem of bad passes. 9 TOs in the first quarter is not a sign of a lack of effort. It is poor decision making and good defense by the opponent. Sometimes bad passes are actually a sign of trying too hard.
The only person I would say showed a lack of effort was J ONeal. Our problems were TOs turning into transition plays for the Heat.
If it was a lack of focus, what were they failing to focus on? What indicates a lack of effort? These seem to me to be sports cliches that people just automatically attribute to teams that are performing poorly.
I completely agree with the opinion above about Wade shooting 3's. That is not his game. He isn't good enough from 3 to do that for 4 games straight. He looked rather mediocre from 3 in other games.
Could not disagree with you more strongly. The ball movement wasn't there. The defensive rotations weren't there. And once Doc went to the bench in the first, the effort went from bad to nonexistent, especially with Wallace.
We did absolutely nothing well in the first period on either end of the floor, which shows a decided lack of focus. And we didn't close out on anyone in the first period - terrible, terrible defense, very reminiscent of the regular season. That returned in a couple of shorter sequences in the second half that were equally destructive.
And no, it is not inevitable in the association that any offense can get any shot it wants against any defense. Good defensive teams - championship teams - get over screens, they close out and they suffocate the other team, as the 2008 Celtics did repeatedly.
Championship defensive teams dictate the pace of the game and the quality of the shot to the offense with effort and intelligence - which we've done in this series. We didn't do enough of it today to win a game - against basically anyone.
We spent much of the game running uphill from the total lack of focus and effort with which the game was started - and we're going to lose each and every playoff game from this point that we approach similarly.
