Conspiring Celtics

 Celtics Conspiring?

The idea of playing for specific seeding in the playoffs is not new or unacceptable, but playing the majority of your season badly enough to finish as a lower seed would be a new kind of low. Besides, how difficult is it to lose enough games in the Eastern Conference to drop that much in the rankings. I am not a basketball expert by any means, but the way I see it, the Celtics played the whole season for the fourth seed instead of the first. I can see Danny supporting this, once they felt that 73 wins were unattainable.

I believe there is only one team that the Celtics were scarred of heading into the post-season: Atlanta. The Hawks have been engineered to defeat the Celtics, but they were very susceptible to other playoff teams. It is my belief that the Celtics wanted Atlanta to finish 3rd so that they would not face each other until the conference finals at the earliest, and let either Orlando or Cleveland eliminate the Hawks.

It is hard to really show much evidence that this is the case. They did start the season amazingly well, but can you really dispute the injuries that kept the big three at bay most of the season? Defensive stoppers Daniels and Allen were injured and couldn’t crack the rotation. But they will say that they were minimizing minutes for the expected post-season run. They played hard against the top three seeds in the Eastern Conference, despite often missing a key player.

The argument exists, circumstantial or not. Either way, we’ll figure out how it works out in the next week or so. It kind of makes me feel bad for the Hawks coach. He may have game planned to defeat the best team in the league, but didn’t have the luck to face them. He could have been the NBA’s Herb Brooks, instead he’ll most likely be the next unemployed coach. Are the C’s to blame?