March 4, 1985
McHale Drops 56 on Pistons
Celtics coach K.C. Jones couldn't have been more impressed with the way Kevin McHale played yesterday against the Pistons. "I can't remember," marveled Jones, "the last time Kevin had four assists."
And Larry Bird casually joked that records are made to be broken, "that it might stand till the next game," that even M.L. Carr, of all shooters, promised afterward that he could do more in the next game than McHale did in his last. "M.L. said when he comes back into the lineup he'll probably be the one to break Kevin's record," said Bird. "Only thing is that we don't know if M.L. is going to come back in or not."
Records are taken lightly in Boston? Oh, far from it, because all the team basked in the 56 points scored yesterday by Kevin McHale as much as McHale himself, a glow on all the Celtics. Just that individual records are so foreign, so unimportant, so incongruous to this team that everybody who was fortunate to be in Boston Garden yesterday afternoon came away with the rarest of athletic treats - witnessing an individual record that was fashioned by a team.
"We can always look back and say we played as a team and Kevin's offense came in the flow of the game and he scored his 56 points," said Bird. "All we were doing was taking advantage of the situation because Detroit doesn't have anybody who can guard Kevin."
So it was a Boston record, peculiarly Celtic. All of that is true, for sure, but it's just as true that Kevin McHale will fondly take the stat sheet from this afternoon game of March 3, bronze it, frame it and mount it on the mantelpiece and know for all his years this was the day of his life. The 56 points came on only 28 floor shots, McHale burying 22 of them, and 12 of 13 from the free-throw line, and it seemed this was an afternoon when the music never would die.
"Somebody asked me the last time I got 56 points and I told them it was when I was about 12 years old and I was playing in the playground," said McHale, still flushed with the exuberance of scoring more points than all the Celtic legends of the years. "Yup, I must have been playing in that playground from 1 o'clock in the afternoon to 5 or 6 o'clock at night."
He had once scored 33 points with the Celtics and his high this season was 32 and he couldn't remember scoring more than 36 or 37 points in college at Minnesota or in high school. He had always been the player to do his job, to play his role, block shots and pull down rebounds while watching other scorers score, "and I never believed you could have one of these games."
And when it was over, McHale still didn't believe. He has always been a talker and so the right details and the little anecdotes were pushed out front, for all to see, about how his nine-day-old son Michael slept the night through for the first time Saturday and came to the Garden yesterday for his Celtic game and how he had kidded with Danny Ainge before the game that he was going to break the Garden scoring record. When the game began, though, he missed his first shot.
"It was a jump hook and I was thinking, 'Ugggggh,' because I had kind of grinded it up there," said McHale. "I was thinking, 'Aww, geez, not another one of these nights,' because I felt I had played poorly Friday against Atlanta."
Definitely not. McHale next tipped in a rebound "and then I ran the break on the next play and (Dennis Johnson) made a real nice pass on the break and I laid it in and I began thinking that I was motoring a little. So I just kept running and running and then after a while you get the feeling that you just can't be stopped."
With Bill Laimbeer guarding Robert Parish, the Pistons first tried Kent Benson on McHale and, after three unhappy minutes, Major Jones. The mismatch was so great that McHale had 22 points by the end of the first quarter, one off the team record, and 31 at the half, also one short of the Celtics' mark for the half. McHale had the invincible feeling at other times, the aura that he just couldn't be stopped, "but this time it was lasting a lot longer than it ever did before."
And when Benson was tossed out of the game in the third quarter for complaining too stridently on a foul, the Celtics' bench was shouting at referee Jake O'Donnell to let Benson stay and let McHale play. McHale recalled "the guys on the bench yelling, 'Don't throw him out; don't throw him out.' "
Strangely, while all the points were piling up, they were piling up quietly. Few fans seemed to notice, many of the fans here as usual to watch this team of Bird-and-the-Celtics, and when McHale first exited for a rest with 8:45 left in the second quarter, the cheering was fond but not loud enough for what was happening. So Carr ("I thought people should appreciate what Kevin was doing") stood up by the bench, turned to the crowd and led the cheerleading for McHale.
By the fourth quarter, though, McHale's numbers were posted on the message board after every basket, the cheering louder and loudest, "and I was thinking, 'This'd be a good day for me to go out and play golf or darts or anything else.' Too bad I can't do anything else today."
When McHale's total reached 47, Bird winked at him and then signaled across the court that the ball would be coming his way ("Everybody's eyes were on him to break the record; I just wanted to get the pressure off him real quick") and it did, Bird's passes setting up McHale's final nine points.
"Larry's a classy man," said McHale, "and he told me to keep on going down low because he was going to get the ball to me."
It ended with 56 points and McHale waving off Ray Williams, saying he wanted no more passes and no more points. "Heck," said Bird, "we should have thrown rocks at Kevin for not going after 60."
Bird was in one corner of the locker room saying this while McHale was still surrounded by the media in another corner. The day was ending, but a piece of paper was still in Kevin McHale's fingers.
It was the stat sheet. Proof that the 56 points truly were his.
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