There was always doubt last season. The Celtics scorched NBA America for the six-month regular season, winning 66 games and vaulting into the playoffs with momentum and star power.
But we didn't know how good they were until they passed those tournament tests. The Celtics couldn't win on the road in the first two rounds of the playoffs. They could have lost Game 7 against Cleveland. They lost a home playoff game against the Pistons. Then they were consensus underdogs against the Lakers.
But they dug in and won the championship with relative ease. In case you forgot, they demolished the Lakers, 131-92, in the final game.
Now there is no doubt. It's as if they're telling the rest of the NBA, "You had your chance. The window is closed. Now we know we are the best and nothing can stop us from winning again."
The Celtics beat the Pacers, 114-96, at the Garden last night to improve to 18-2. They are 16-1 since losing at Indiana in the third game of the season. They have shucked off the Cavaliers, the Hawks, the Iverson Pistons, and the Brand Sixers. They have dispatched the Magic and avenged their aberration loss to the Pacers. They have demonstrated that they are even better than they were last season.
After yesterday morning's shootaround, a sweating, ever-serious Kevin Garnett did his best to explain what has happened to this team since the start of the playoffs last spring.
"The series with Atlanta and even with Cleveland, we just figured it out," he said. "We knew we hadn't done it yet. I don't think we looked at ourselves and had any kind of doubt. We just said, 'We're going to get this one tonight.' We lost. And then we'd say, 'We're just going to get this one tonight then.' We lost. But we went into every game knowing and thinking that we were going to win that game.
"The first two series [seven-gamers against Atlanta and Cleveland], I thought, gave us even more mental capacity for when we played Detroit. We knew Detroit was one of those teams that had been put together for a long time. We knew how to beat the teams of our caliber. So we went in there and I thought not winning on the road in those first two series just made us stronger. And we learned something. We learned that togetherness is everything and there was no better time to exercise that."
Doc Rivers was only too happy to step into the time machine.