John from Hemet wrote:-= original quote snipped =-
I am just curious by the answer to this....but what exactly is misleading about your 7 game series with the Hawks?
I mean....my view is that the regular season is one season in itself and the playoffs is another......but you did in fact get taken 7 games by the losing record Hawks. I dont see what is so misleading about that.
Well people (non-Celtics fans) have mentioned that we
barely made it past them. Yes, technically we got pushed to the edge, but the Hawks never had a chance against us. What's misleading is that people think that the Hawks even had a small chance. As if it was teetering on the edge of being another Dallas/Golden State series. But this isn't the case, there was never any doubt that we would win; it was more frustration that we would easily beat them at home, but struggled to beat them on the road.
I mentioned that the playoff match-ups played out similarly to how teams played each other in the regular season; you can say "anything can happen" in the playoffs, but this true only to a minor extent: sure, you have to play the games, but the outcome will likely coincide with how the teams play each other. This is why the Warriors upset the Mavericks: it's not because anything can happen, but it's because during the regular season the Warriors matched-up well against them.
Hawks played us tough in some regular season games, but the fact that they beat us on the road was one of the two deviances I saw that differentiated the Celtics and Lakers playoffs vs. the regular season. You could say that since the Hawks pushed us to seven games, anything could happen in the playoffs. And I said it's misleading to think this because even though they took us to seven games, we still blew them out in every win of ours, which is right on course. So even though there was the deviance in them winning on the road, the series as a whole played out the way it should've, with us blowing them out in four wins.
So what I'm saying is that if we faced the Lakers without Gasol in the finals, we would blow them out. So I guess I really didn't mean that Gasol would need to dominate in order to beat us. What I meant to say is, the Lakers have to be much, much better than they were when we played them to have a chance against us. And yes, they are much better than they were before, but are they that much better that they go from a team that we would've crushed, to a team that will crush us? I just really don't see how we go from being a team that dominates against the Lakers, to a team that will be dominated by them, just by them adding Gasol and having their young players playing better. I don't see how this suddenly makes people think we'll only win once against them this series. And I don't see how Gasol could make the Lakers a better defensive team. Sure, the offense is probably much better, but defense is the most important aspect of championship basketball, and I can't see the Lakers having a better chance at stopping us than they did when we played them.