When the Russell-Cousy teams beat you badly, you knew it. When the Havlicek-Cowens teams beat you badly, you knew it. When the Larry-Kevin-Chief-DJ teams beat you badly, you knew it. Somewhere in there they'd hit you with a 14-0 or 20-2 fast break-oriented run and the crowd would be exploding and you knew you were getting your butt kicked.
But this team doesn't operate that way.
With this team, you think you're in the game, even if you aren't. This team isn't about runs; it's about stops. Defensive stops aren't sexy. Points are sexy, and points in rapid succession are sexier still.
Students of Atlanta Hawks history should know. The Celtics won Game 6 of a first-round series in 1973 with a devastating fourth-quarter run. The Celtics won the series-concluding fifth game of an Atlanta series in 1986 with a downright surreal 36-6 third quarter that concluded with a run of 24-0 on a Bill Walton trailer dunk.
This team doesn't deal in tsunamis. This team makes you feel as if you're tied up on the beach and the tide is coming in and coming in and coming in, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it. They get you with 6-2s, not 14-0s. They just keep making more stops than you, many more, in fact.
If you never looked at a scoreboard last night, you might have thought the Celtics were leading by 10 or 12, when, in fact, they were winning by 18 or 20. It's an amazing phenomenon, and it happens all the time.
Last night's victory was the 47th by 10 or more points this season. That's 47 wins out of 68 by 10-plus, and that is a simply amazing stat. But in most of them the vanquished foe came away thinking that if only we had done this or that at a particular time, we could have won the game.
It's ridiculous, of course. The Celtics are very good at making sure you're not in the game. And we know for sure the Hawks have not been in either of these games, although they did make some progress last night.
On Sunday night, their only lead was 2-0. Last evening, they led the Celtics as late as 7-5. At this rate they might actually win the 17th game in a best-of-35.
