Boston Celtics @ Cleveland Cavaliers, Fri, Jan 9 2009

a scouting report on both teams:

Cleveland Cavaliers

• LeBron played like a MVP. He’s completely smooth. He didn’t force any moves or shots, but just following the flow. Seems like he’s come to a stage that he would let the game come to him. He’s unstoppable when penetrating, splitting double team easily. He hitall the shots. layups, floaters, 3s and fadaways, even when there’s a hand on his face. He played hard, even diving for loose balls; and most important of all, he played excellent defense, esp. against Paul Pierce, both pick-n-roll and iso situations. Oh, and he hustled for blocks too! In the past, people (including yours truly) always complained about his defense, but apparently he has put considerable works on that, studied enough films and apparently he played like a terrific defender. Or maybe it’s just this game, as he said beforehand that he had circled this date right when the schedule come out. Simply put, he wanted to win this game badly and he for sure gave his best.


• Mo Williams is an amazing scoring threat. He hit some tough shots.


• Varejao was surprisingly aggressive in offense, but his moves and shots were just too ugly to watch. As usual, he hustled a lot, grabbed rebounds and made some good defense by flopping.


• Delonte West did a passable job as a role player. He facilitated the offense, hit open shots and palyed defense.


• Once again, Big Ben is completely washed out.


• The bench (Boobie Gibson, J.J. Hickson, Wally Szczerbiak) was their weakest link. The Cs were able to outscore the Cavs whenever their starters (in particular LBJ) sat. They missed “Big Z” Ilgauskas badly, since they had to rely on J.J. Hickson as backup big man.


• The Cavs played with energy and were 100% focused. They played with confidence and were determined. While the Cavs didn’t need to worry about offense when LBJ was basically scoring at will anywhere on the court, it is their stellar defense that won the game. As said, LBJ played first class defense on PP, in addition, the Cavs was very aggressive guarding the perimeter, challenging shots and shut out passing lanes. They had terrific defense rotation and stole many balls while the Cs were definitely over-passing. As always, defense won games.

Boston Celtics

• PP was fully covered by LBJ, ended up forcing shots and drives. He was also careless with the ball, letting the ball being stolen several times (esp. by LBJ). He was also helpless defending LBJ. Don’t blame him, LBJ was simply superman tonight.


• KG played hard and did a good job in rebounding. However, except for a few nice lob passes from Rondo resulting in dunks and easy layups early on, for most of the game, KG always settled for outside jumpers. Give credits to the Cavs’ tight defense which made him hard to stay in the paint.


• As usual, Ray Allen hit his outside shots. Arguably, he’s the best among the Big Three.


• Rondo was terrific in running offense and finding open teammates. His court vision is superb. He played ok defense too and rebounded well as a guard. However, he simply couldn’t shoot, be it a layup, an open J or even FT.


• Kendrick Perkins benefitted from the nice passing job of Rondo and scored some easy layups in the paint. However, he is slow in defense rotation, letting the Cavs’ big penetrating at will, and even grabbing offensive rebounds.


• The Celtics’ bench was actually ok and arguably won the battle against the second team of the Cavs. I like Leon Powe. But they would love to have James Posey to guard LBJ!


• Overall, the Celtics were severely bothered by the defense of the Cavs. Their reaction to such top notch defense is over-passing. And when they lost their confidence, they started to look tentative. On defense, they have no clue to slow down LBJ and were slow in defense rotation. They didn’t play with their usual intensity in defense. They clearly were outplayed, out-hustled and outscored by the Cavs. They were so desperate that they resolved to do the Hack-a-Ben (Wallce) strategy late in Q4! What a shame!

Conclusion

• From the bottom of my heart, I don’t believe the Celtics are as lousy as this game shows, nor the Cavs are so superb as this game shows. Afterall, it’s just one out of 82 regular season games. However, the domination by the Cavs in this game will for sure have some not-so-small psychological factor when the two teams inevitably meet in the playoffs.