The switches that all but sealed the Celts’ fate

First and foremost: Congratulations to the Los Angeles Lakers, the NBA’s 2010 champions after their 83-79 Game 7 victory over the Celtics last night.

There will be plenty of time for postmortems for both this game and the season in the days to come. It’s time I’ll need to take before I write, especially when it comes to the 2009-10 Boston Celtics, a team that so frustrated me throughout the regular season before coming up with a blissfully surprising postseason run that fell just barely short of adding an 18th championship to the franchise’s storied history. Plenty to absorb, lots to consider in assessing this Celtics team from a big-picture standpoint, and this group has at least proved itself worthy of more than my sleepy-eyed ruminations at three on a Friday morning after a night of basketball that was draining to watch.

For today, we focus on the one play remains stuck in my head. It’s not the play that doomed the Celtics because, by and large, individual plays don’t doom teams all by themselves. But it is the play that made clear that the Celtics would be all but done for as long as the Lakers could convert free throws.

The situation: Fifty-one seconds to play. We’ve just witnessed a bizarre offensive outburst featuring back-to-back-to-back threes from Rasheed Wallace, Ron Artest and Ray Allen, leaving the Lakers with the ball nursing a 79-76 lead. If the Celtics can make a stop and gain possession, they will have a chance to tie with a three or play for the quick two and extend the game with fouls, both scenarios that leave the green very much alive.

Boston puts token pressure on in the backcourt as the Lakers inbound to Kobe Bryant, just enough to force him to lob the ball ahead to Lamar Odom on the right sideline. Odom pushes the ball down the right wing, but Rajon Rondo gets back to stop the ball, and Odom tosses back to Bryant just inside midcourt with 19 seconds remaining on the shot clock. Ray Allen steps out to stick Bryant slightly offset right of the top of the circles. Kevin Garnett stands behind him, sloughing off just outside the foul line to discourage Bryant from a quick take to the lane. Fine.

This is when things start to go south.

With 15 seconds left on the shot clock, Garnett turns his head to see Derek Fisher as the open man standing alone in the left corner. Kobe continues to dawdle up top. He is going to run this 24-second clock most of the way down. Garnett turns the other way to see Rasheed Wallace matched up with Gasol underneath and Rajon Rondo taking Lamar Odom down below the right wing. Kobe continues to play with the ball several feet off the top of the circles. Garnett starts toward Odom, but Rondo appears to wave him off, and KG changes direction toward Fisher in the left corner instead. This is already not good.

On the air, ABC analyst Jeff Van Gundy questions why the Celtics aren’t matched up properly. The Celtics cannot hear him.

As the shot clock winds inside 10 seconds, Gasol starts up from the block, presumably to set a high screen for Bryant. Rondo waves at Wallace to pick up Odom down low and switches to Gasol.

It’s becoming frustratingly clear how this is going to turn out even if Kobe misses the shot everyone in the building knows he is going to take. Watching at home, it feels like the next few seconds happen in painfully slow motion.

Gasol sets a screen to Ray Allen’s left. As Bryant steps the other way, Gasol turns and rolls toward the basket. Bryant releases a three-pointer, which comes off to the right. But as far as the Celtics are concerned, it doesn’t really matter. Gasol has position and size, and he corrals the rebound with relative ease. With 27 seconds to play. And the Lakers up three.

The rest is academic. The Celtics probably have to foul because if they don’t, even if they get a stop, they may be down to less than three seconds to tie the game. If the Lakers score, the Celts will trail by two possessions with barely a shot clock’s worth of time to play. The options are bad and worse. In this case, Gasol finds Bryant on a sharp cut to the basket, who draws a foul from Rasheed Wallace at the rim, Sheed’s sixth and final personal. Bryant sinks his two freebies, and the Lakers lead by five with 25.7 seconds remaining.

The Celtics will never have the ball with a chance to tie or lead thereafter.

Yes, Rondo would later hit the three to cut the deficit to two points and make the final few seconds interesting, but the Celtics still found themselves reduced to hoping for a miss from Sasha Vujacic at the foul line a possession later, a miss that never came. The Gasol offensive rebound set provided the Celtics their best opportunity to get the ball back down just one possession, and 20-plus seconds of defense went to waste because of a poor job matching up.

This isn’t to say it was an easy situation. If Garnett goes to Odom, Rondo still has to make up the distance all the way across the floor to Fisher. Perhaps when Kobe sees that, he flings the ball to his point guard in the corner for an open three. But it was a chance the Celtics had to take because they simply could not allow certain match-ups to occur in that spot. The Lakers’ proficiency on the offensive glass wasn’t breaking news. Rebounding has been a key storyline throughout the series. The Lakers pounded the Celts on the glass in their Game 6 romp, and they managed to hang in throughout the early portion of Game 7 in no small part because they destroyed the Celtics on the offensive glass yet again. Gasol’s key rebound would be his ninth at that end of the floor, or one more offensive rebound than the Celtics’ entire team collected for the night. Given how well the Lakers hit the glass throughout the evening, there is no guarantee Garnett or Wallace keeps Gasol from getting to that particular carom. But I like the Celtics’ chances a whole lot better with one of them trying to box out Gasol rather than a point guard (what a great board man he is for his position notwithstanding) giving up 11 inches and some 80 pounds.

So that’s how after a game that featured no shortage of missed opportunities on both sides, it’s one possession of poor defensive match-ups leading to back-breaking results that haunts me this morning.

***

For further analysis of this play with visuals to boot, check out the great work of Sebastian Pruiti over at NBA Playbook.