"The Truth" may be a reach, but he sure lived up to his Captain's title yesterday.
Paul Pierce brought his certified 'A' game to a deciding seventh game against the Cavaliers. He stood tall in the Cousy-Russell-Havlicek-Bird sense, picking the most propitious moment to play his best game of the 2008 playoffs.
"He just willed his team to victory," said Cleveland's LeBron James. "I know that was the breakout game he was waiting for."
Pierce could have said the same thing about LeBron, the ridiculously precocious 23-year old who scored 45 points. With Pierce scoring 41, there were serious overtones of a much-discussed Game 7 against Atlanta 20 years ago featuring two Hall of Famers fully recognizable by first names only. But this personal shootout will stand on its own merits, given that they combined for a fairly amazin' 45 percent of the points in a 97-92 Celtics triumph that sends them into the Eastern Conference finals against those hardy perennials, the Detroit Pistons.
Pierce was not having a great series. He was held to 4 points in Game 1, and he averaged a mere 14 points a game in the three fruitless trips to Cleveland. The only reason you didn't hear all that much about this business was that everyone was focusing on Ray Allen's astonishing (ongoing) futility.
But Pierce took charge immediately yesterday, opening the day's scoring with a very difficult foul line jumper that, by any reasonable measure, was a force. But it went in, and so did the next one, and the next one (a second chance three). He had 9 of the first 14 Boston points as the Celtics moved to a 16-4 lead, a cushion they would exploit for the rest of the peculiar game in which the Cavaliers never led, were never even tied past 4-4, and yet were never out of.
This was an aggressive, but not reckless, Paul Pierce. You know how he goes into those wild spin-o-ramas, crashing into people in the vain hope of getting to the line? Nope, there was none of that yesterday. His six trips to the line (11 for 12) were the result of intelligent, confident, I'm-a-star-and-I-know-what-I'm-doing excursions to the hoop. And his shot selection? Just outstanding.
He had 26 by halftime, and that represented more than half of the Boston points as the Celtics moved to a 50-40 lead by intermission. He had 35 after three quarters, and, after sinking two professional jumpers in the first six minutes of the fourth, he concluded his afternoon and early evening's work with a pair of free throws with 7.9 seconds left (the first an up-and-in job he said must have been guided in by the "Ghost of Red") that closed the deal.