1988 NBA Playoffs: Bird Takes Teammates to the Shed

4/30/1988

This is what Larry Bird does for the Celtics. This was not a lefty leaner in the lane that would turn this game on its heel, but a glare of disgust, a stare of rebuke. This was not a three-pointer from Nashua Street that suddenly lit the fires, but words of rebuke. This was anger.

And this was the situation in this first playoff game of bumps and bruises, black-and-blues, pokes in the eye and bodies on the parquet. The Celtics were in the game, 60-59 their favor, but not really in the game when Mark Jackson and Sidney Green of the Knicks swooped down from midcourt on the break, Bird back there on defense.

Jackson got his shot off, which happens in such situations, and Jackson also missed his shot, which also happens. But what happened next shouldn't happen if the Celtics are in the game, because Green was able to swat in an uncontested stuff. Three Celtics watched contentedly from the wrong side of midcourt; they had barely moved.

Bird himself tapped both fingers on both his shoulders, Bird himself signaling a 20-second timeout, and Bird himself said the words to his teammates that won't be repeated here, they being too rich to go with the morning muffins. He was angry and disgusted; the Celtics were not playing defense.

"Well, I thought me and (Dennis Johnson) did all we could do to play defense and get back and make him miss his shot, but we just didn't get much help," said Bird. "Nobody else came across half-court, so I thought it was time for a 20-second and to regroup after something like that."

It was a lazy play by lazy Celtics, and the Celtics, even if they are not good, will not permit a team to play lazy basketball against them. They work, and you must work to beat them. Until then, the Celtics were not working.

"We were back downcourt," said Kevin McHale, "and it was bad defensive play by us. We didn't get back on defense, and then there was that 20-second timeout. K.C. (Jones) said to us, 'Hey, if you can't get back, then get out of the game.' And everybody was pumped up and we started playing a little better after that."

Jones was as upset as Bird. "We've got two people back on defense and three people nowhere in sight, and they get the offensive rebound and put it in to score," said Jones. "That's time for 20 seconds and some words. I told them, 'You can't allow two men to play defense.' "

The words were taken to heart by the Celtics, but not immediately. Patrick Ewing took the ball in the corner and dribbled -- that's dribbled -- around Robert Parish from corner to basket for a score and a 68-65 lead. Then Bill Cartwright went around Parish again, the score now 70-70, but soon the Knicks would stall, for the Celtics would erupt.

Boston went on an 11-1 run at the end of the third period, then carried it to 27-5 deep into the fourth quarter, but citing the points scored would be looking through the microscope from the wrong end. For it was defense, not points, that had turned this game into a rout and reduced the Knicks to the appearance of a sub-.500 team that they are.

"Then Kevin was blocking some shots and DJ was playing good defense and Robert was getting the rebounds," said Bird of the repercussions once the Boston defense "kicked in." The Celtics' defense "really shut them down there when we really neeed to, and then we went down the other end and scored some baskets."

Technically, Boston also adjusted when Jones switched defensive style and had his players sag more on the inside. "I thought K.C. did a great job of changing defenses," said McHale. "We had two defenses and we were into the aggressive fronting one and they started reading that very well. Then, all of a sudden, we got back more into a sagging defense, playing behind the guy, and once we did that, we seemed to take them out of their game. I thought it was a really good coaching job, changing defenses."

McHale was Cyclops for much of this one, for he took a poke in the eye from Cartwright in the first quarter (Chopper Bill also got Bird in the nose on a pick and Danny Ainge in the chops on a rebound), and McHale couldn't see well for the rest of the game. He went to an optometrist afterwards.

"For a long time, my whole left side was blurred," said McHale. "Everything was a blur."

So were the Celtics in that final 3:32 of the third and all of the fourth quarter that counted. Until then, it was rough-and-tumble, ragged and edgy, and even if New York's Johnny Newman saw it this way -- "A lot of banging went on out there; we're a tough team, but they really knocked us around" -- the game seemed more like a WWF night at the Garden, rasslin' everywhere, than a playoff game.

Then came that Green stuff after a Jackson miss, a few choice cusses from Bird and Boston reacting for the defense, skillfully and tightly. A word to the wise usually is sufficient with the Celtics.