Pickup basketball

"Wade killed us," acknowledged Celtics coach Doc Rivers. "But he killed us more with his toughness than anything else. That's what bothered me."

Rivers saw this game in very coach-like terms. Forget the 53-percent first half shooting. Forget the halftime lead (a late '50s-like 60-59). Forget, in fact, everything but things he can't fully document, but he knows what he saw. He sounded more like Bruins coach Mike Sullivan -- remember him? -- than your average NBA coach. "I thought we were completely outworked. Every loose ball, every long rebound, everything belonged to them."

Did he also say something about not mucking it up in the corners?

It just didn't feel right to the Celtics' mentor, even with his team trailing by just 2 (87-85), with 11:26 remaining. The way Rivers saw it, the scoreboard was hiding the truth.

"Part of me said we were OK, because we've had games like this lately and we've pulled through," he said. "But I kept looking up and seeing the "Hustle Stats' [on the auxiliary scoreboard], and all the indicators were bad. We were getting crushed in all the key areas, and I didn't know how we were going to turn the corner."

He was right. They didn't. They lost touch with the Heat almost immediately, scoring but 5 points in the next six minutes. When they snapped out of it, they were down by 11 at 101-90.

Once Rivers heard that Shaq was not going to play, he knew he had a new set of problems. A coach can approach a situation like this in different ways, but in the end he just doesn't know how his team is going to respond. What he got from his squad was a nice display of finesse basketball. The Celtics like to run, and it was just fine with them to become engaged in a 33-33 first period -- it wasn't too long ago that this would have been a Heat halftime score -- and a 60-59 half. But while the Heat were mixing in some helpful hustle plays, the Celtics were subsisting on the run-and-gun stuff exclusively.