C's Cruise

January 5, 2012

This was the best kind of night for Paul Pierce.

Not even a week removed from his season debut, there's no sense in grinding the Celtics captain's tender foot to dust.



That's where the injury-depleted New Jersey Nets played a nice foil last night. Pierce, with 24 points by the end of the third quarter, was able to sit for the last 12 minutes of the C's 89-70 victory.
The Celtics improved to 4-0 with Pierce in the lineup after dropping their first three games without him.

Considering that Ray Allen stayed home with a severe cold, every drop of Pierce's offense was needed to push this one out of reach. Pierce scored nine points in a 16-2 third-quarter run that put away the Nets, and Brandon Bass, who is fast becoming a torrential bench scorer, took up the slack.
Bass finished with 15 points, including five second-half jumpers, and continued to endear himself to the Garden crowd.

The Celtics, down by a point at halftime, 35-34, moved ahead at 43-40 on a Keyon Dooling 3-pointer, but they had trouble carving out space because of pressure from Nets replacement point guard Sundiata Gaines. The C's finally punched through with their first serious run of the night, the 16-2 burst that began with a pair of Bass jumpers that were followed by back-to-back Pierce 3-pointers. Before the run was finished, Avery Bradley would chip in a trey of his own, and Pierce would score three more from the free throw line, including the one that gave the Celtics a 61-46 lead with 1:33 left in the third.

The fourth quarter opened with the Celtics up, 63-47, and just in case the lead wasn't enough, the Celtics broke out with another run. A 10-0 eruption early in the fourth pushed the advantage to 75-51. Kevin Garnett kicked it off, Bass buried his fifth jumper of the second half and Rajon Rondo followed with a fast-break hoop off a Garnett steal-and-dish. Rondo and Garnett followed with baseline jumpers, and the Celtics had their peak lead of 24 points with 7:15 left.Despite 10 points on 4-for-5 shooting in the opening 12 minutes from Pierce, the C's shot 42.4 percent over the first 12 minutes and trailed 18-17.

The Nets quickly dropped to 36 percent early in the second, when neither team scored over the first 2:04, until Garnett finally hit a seven-footer, followed by two Bradley free throws for a 22-17 Celtics lead.

The C's run extended to 6-0, and their lead to 24-17, before the Nets, scoreless over the first 3:47 of the quarter, finally broke through with a Farmar 3-pointer.

Three straight hoops from MarShon Brooks, a rookie out of Providence College, including a 3, were good enough to tie the score at 29 before Garnett gave the Celts the lead back off a Rondo feed.
Shelden Williams, with a pair of hoops, was good for a 33-31 Nets lead, this time before Pierce tied the score off the break. Williams broke that tie with two more free throws with 1:03 left in the half, before Bass, after rebounding his own miss and drawing a foul, cut the Nets lead to 35-34 at the half.