Shuttlesworth Seals the Win

June 2008

Shuttlesworth Seals the Win

LOS ANGELES - It went from being a game you wanted to forget to being a game you'll be telling your grandchildren about.



It was the Red Sox coming back against the Yankees in '04. It was Adam Vinatieri making the kick in the snow against the Raiders. It was Havlicek stealing the ball, Orr sailing through the air, Pudge whacking the ball off the foul pole.

In other words, it was one of the greatest games in Boston sports history.

As if we needed another.

Hyperbole? Hardly. What makes the Celtics' 97-91 victory over the Lakers last night at the Staples Center so memorable isn't merely that it puts the Green on the brink of their 17th NBA championship, but that in doing so they mounted a comeback of epic proportions.

We can't give you a history lesson that involves, say, the St. Louis Hawks or Washington Capitols or Rochester Royals simply because the NBA's basket-by-basket record keeping does not date back to the Stone Age of hoops.

What we do know is the whiz kids from Elias Sports Bureau got on the ball, literally, beginning with the 1970-71 season, and since then no team had rallied to win a game in the NBA Finals after trailing by 24 points.

Until last night.

Yep, the Celts trailed by 24 points midway through the second quarter, yet won this game.

No, there wasn't a buzzer-beating shot that clinched it, with the ball being taken off the court and packed up for shipment to the Hall of Fame.

But all games of historic proportions have one play that instantly gets frozen in time, and that moment in this game was provided by Ray Allen, who, with the Celtics leading 94-91 and about 40 seconds remaining, performed a one-man dribbling exhibition, chewing up the 24-second clock before driving to the basket and rolling in a left-handed layup. The Celtics now led by five with 16 seconds left, and, just like that, Allen jackhammered his name into the Boston sports history books.

``Oh, it was huge,'' Celtics coach Doc Rivers said. ``It was ... it was really supposed to be a middle pick-and-roll with Kevin (Garnett) and Ray, and Ray waved Kevin off because he liked the matchup that he had already, so he didn't want to bring in another defender to help.

``It was a great call by Ray. And then him getting to the basket was huge. The layup was just tremendous.''

Yes, tremendous. But listen closely to Rivers and you'd swear his record keeping is even better than what the Elias Sports Bureau has come up with. He knows something. He really does.

Don't tell him the Celtics are within one victory of a championship, and DO NOT tell him no team in the NBA Finals has rebounded from a 3-1 deficit.

Do. Not. Tell. Him. That.

``You have to win one game four times,'' he said. ``We've only done it three times as far as I'm concerned.

``It was a great comeback, but you don't get anything for it.''

You want high-fives and lots of hollering? Fair enough.

``Yeah, I can taste it,'' said Garnett, though even then there was a disclaimer that the Celtics are still ``one win away from our goal.''

Paul Pierce put it this way: ``Hey, I don't want to get overjoyed. I want to go out there and try to win Game 5 on Father's Day and then I'll be able to breathe. Right now I'm waiting to exhale.''

Today, nobody in Boston will be complaining about the extra day off between Game 4 and Game 5.

For a game such as we saw last night deserves an extra day of dissection and analysis, an extra day of good, old-fashioned sports talk. Fans, too, need to exhale a little.

Yes, there is a flip side to this. Kobe Bryant, noting that the Celtics outscored the Lakers 31-15 in the third quarter, said, ``They played great in the third quarter and we played like crap.''

Well, OK, there's that. For every Bobby Thomson home run, there is a Ralph Branca on the mound. That's just the way it is.

But today, throughout Boston, it's what the winning team did that'll be talked about, not what the losing team did not do.