Oh, the most deserving team won, all right.
"I'm really proud of my team," Rivers said. "Clearly, we did not play well tonight. But we had the right spirit. This is my ninth or 10th year, and this is one of my favorite groups, for the way they fought. But give Orlando credit, they were terrific."
The spirit was willing, perhaps, but the flesh was not up to the task. The Celtics could not stop a team that came out firing threes and never stopped. The Magic are very much a 21st-century team, and so it is appropriate that on a night they advanced to the conference finals for the first time in 13 years they did so by shooting significantly better from 3-point range (61.9 percent) than from two (47).
It was not lost on Doc that after yielding the game's first basket to Rondo the Magic answered with back-to-back threes by Rafer Alston and Hedo Turkoglu, who was the definite Man of the Match with 25 points (on 9-for-12 shooting) and 12 assists. For this one night, anyway, if he had a notion to call himself the Turkish Larry Bird no one could raise a serious objection.
"I thought those two threes they made early were really big for them," Rivers declared. "They had been struggling, and it really picked them up."
This night was inevitable. This bunch stopped being the world champions the minute Kevin Garnett stopped playing. They were still the Boston Celtics, but they were no longer a viable contender. They were a team trying to maximize its potential, whether that meant beating the Magic, extending them to seven, or whatever.
It turns out they had blown their great opportunity to advance last Thursday in Amway Arena, when they allowed the Magic to win a Game 6 in which the home team shot a miserable 36 percent from the floor and 55 percent from the line. The Celtics did themselves in with 22 turnovers, good for 28 points, squandering many good chances to put the game away. From a Celtics viewpoint, this Game 7 never should have been played.
