Rondo leads Celtics to Ninth Straight Victory


I was at the game last night in Washington, sitting about 15 rows behind the basket where Gilbert Arenas missed the two free throws at the end. It was worth every penny. First off, over half the fans in the stadium were Celtics fans. The "Let's go Celtics" chant was started by the people right in back of me. It shows that Celtics fans travel as well as any other fan base in the NBA. They even gave out free munchkins from Dunkin Donuts to the people in front of us. It was like being back in Boston.


The game itself was all about Rondo. Rondo scored 21 points and 11 assists, including an eye-popping dunk that sealed the game with about a minute to go. This was the first time I can remember that Rondo took over 20 shots in a game. It's not the formula for success all the time, but for this game it was needed. This guy could score 20-25 points every night if he wanted to, but  is more of a facilitator by nature. Perk and Wallace did a good job on the boards and the Celtics as a whole did a better job of rebounding as a team.
Garnett came back to earth last night, but still was 8-14 from the floor. Ray Allen surpassed the 20,000 point mark and hit a big three pointer in crunch time. Even Tony Allen scored 8 points, though he is still a turnover waiting to happen. After his palming violation, one of his 3 turnovers in the game, all of Celtics fans let out a collective groan. We really need to make a trade.

After the first half I thought this was going to be a blowout. However in the second half the Celtics shooting tapered off, and the Wizards capitalized with some hot shooting of their own. This Wizards team is very talented, but undisciplined and quite frankly unintelligent. They are also lazy and don't seem to have any team chemistry. The only guy I really like on that team is Antawn Jamison.

Look, here is the harsh reality to all Wizards fans. Washington will never win with a point guard like Gilbert Arenas. He really is a ball hog at heart and those two free throws he missed were inexcusable. However, the biggest bonehead play of the game was made by Randy Foye. My first reaction when he heaved up that desperation three from the corner was confusion. They had more than 6 seconds to regroup and get a better shot. However that shot is a microcosm of the Wizards in general. They are an undisciplined team that lacks leadership.

Overall, it was not a perfect performance by any means, but a solid win. Anytime you can win 9 games in a row in the NBA it is a superb accomplishment. With the Magic loss, the Celtics are now the top team in the East, but they still have a lot of work that needs to be done. A trade for a backup point guard and/or another backup swing man has to happen or else the Celtics won't win the title. It is as simple as that. I trust Danny and Celtics management to make this work and look forward to Tony Allen being shipped out of town very soon.