LOS ANGELES - This one screamed for tape delay. This was not exactly a great demonstration of the product.
The Lakers won it, but how happy can they be, needing all that huffing and puffing to put away a Celtics team on a night when Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett are shooting 8 for 35?
As for the Celtics, what a stinkbomb.
What else do you need to know? Oh, that's right, the score. It was Los Angeles 87, Boston 81, and what it means is that there will be a Game 5.
"It was not a beautiful ballgame," acknowledged Lakers coach Phil Jackson, who had no cause to say anything about the officiating after this one. "That's a transition game from East Coast to West Coast. Short rest period. There should have been a day off, probably, between the transition between coasts.
"But we'll have a day to catch up tomorrow, and, hopefully, both of us will play better basketball Thursday night."
It was one of those coulda/woulda games for the Celtics, who had gained at least moderate control of things during the third period, and were still leading by 2 at 68-66 with 7:59 to go. But it was not a shoulda game. No way anyone in the Celtics camp could possibly have the audacity to claim that they should have won this game.
One sequence encapsulated it all. After being down by 7 at 77-70, the Celtics had crawled back to a 2-point deficit, and were in possession of the ball with 2:17 to go when Eddie House - remember him? - missed a nice little 13-footer in the lane. OK, he's human. That wasn't the problem.
The problem was that at the other end, the Celtics committed a completely unforgivable sin. Sasha Vujacic had been the second-best LA player (no need to ask who was the best). He had already scored 17 points on 6-for-9 shooting. He had swished a pair of threes and a couple of very long twos, and he was the one man who simply could not be left alone on what was, quite simply, the single biggest defensive moment of the game for the Boston Celtics.
But he was left completely alone in the left corner, and he seized his moment, drilling a three that made it a 5-point game and enabled the Lakers to play from a comfort zone for the remainder of the contest.
Leaving him alone at that moment was absolutely criminal. You deserve no sympathy when you do something like that.
A strong case can be made that the Celtics blew a tremendous opportunity.
"Either that, or they should have blown us out," said Doc Rivers. "I thought our defense was pretty good, but our offense was not. Paul has a night like he had [2 for 14, and no jump shots], and Kevin had a game like he had [6 for 21], but we had a chance to steal the game."
Of course, to do that, you can't leave a great shooter having a hot night alone, but I think we've already covered that.
