At least the Celtics the pressure of ending the season on a perfect record… Now on to reality… ;)

Whoops typo…

Oddly we started off the season very strong defensively, we showed lapses in D and need to shore that up. I don’t see the Celtic intensity at the start of recent games that KG has brought out of this team in preseason and the first few games. I know though it is a long season so definitely I’m far from any panic button.

Orlando is a good young team and they deserved the W tonight. They will be a tough out in the playoffs.

If Scal isn’t hitting the 3 ball he is of no use against the biggest of the big. Please play Pollard in those situations.

Even in defeat, it felt great to see Rondo hitting those outside shots like a vet. I know he has the long arms, etc but it seemed like he had trouble staying in front of Nelson tonight and I’ve noticed that with some of the other points. As quick as he is, I believe he has to improve that phase of his game if we are going to play the lock down D.

Dammit I hate it when Richard Jefferson is right…. ;)

Thank you for the excellent recap. I was only able to catch one quick score tonight, at 60-41, so I figured blowout. I’m happy the C’s came back to make a game of it. You just can’t maintain the maniacal intensity and it has showed the last few games.

We know we’re good, now let’s find the rotation and ration the minutes. 53 wins is fine. Let’s not push it.

This game was a ref job. I figure there must have been easily 15 points that the Celtics should have had or the Magic shouldn’t have in the first quarter alone from fouls that were falsely called or not called, and probably 15 more throughout the rest of the game.

However the worst thing was at the end of the game, the ball goes out right off of the arm of a Magic player, and anyone who was watching the play could see it roll right off his arm like he was trying to do a Globetrotters move and forget to catch the ball, and it was somehow Magic ball. That blown call was the only one that mattered.

I am pretty pissed off about that ref job in general, but it was a hell of a game.

If I could offer a quick suggestion:

Try breaking up your writing into more paragraphs. Big blocks of text doesn’t work journalistically, especially online.

Also, try using the jump feature so that only the lede and a few more grafs are visible on the main page without clicking to read more.

Nice Recap….

Some things:

Allen is still not over the mental part of the injury :(
Hats off to pollard who made the most of his minutes
Hedo killed us…

fps: I also remember thinking that it was clearly off the Orlando player’s hand or arm…….unbelievable call. They didn’t replay it but it seemed so obvious.

win ugly- lose ugly. the magic are a good team. lewis is a stud. nelson can penetrate. hedo can shoot. howard is abeast. at least we made a game of it and could have won. it’s not a bad loss. ray is looking vulnerable. tony is limited physically- i don’t think it is a mental thing. rondo needs to play face up d better, but he is proving he has a shot. his not shooting in the 4th is mental. we need to run plays at the end. pp made a good pass to tony near the end and he missed the bunny. it was a good play. thr refs have been brutal- stern needs to do something.

If you want to help and inferior team beat a superior team, inconsistent officiating— which almost always favors the inferior team— is the best way to do it. It’s almost impossible to play well when you don’t know what’s a foul and what isn’t, particularly when the refs swallow the whistle when the other team does the same thing.

I had to turn last night’s game off. It was a travesty. It was not basketball.

It’s also apparent that the NBA has annointed Dwight Howard as one of the untouchable stars (along with the likes of Dwayne Wade and LeBron James) around which the league will build its marketing campaign. If Kendrick Perkins had been shoving people around and throwing elbows the way Howard was last night, he would have had at least two flagrants. Howard didn’t even get whistled. They also gave him a block on a play I thought was a goaltend, allowed him to shuffle his feet almost every time he caught the ball, and let him camp out in the lane without a single offensive three second call.

FierceLikePaulPierce:

What are you talking about? The post has about 15 separate paragraphs of a few sentences each. That’s plenty.

And there are exactly two paragraphs on the main page before the jump, which is pretty standard stuff.

It’s one thing to be a know-it-all. It’s another to be a dead wrong know-it-all.

Celtic Steve: They did replay it actually and the replay confirmed. I remember Tommy saying “…and they somehow call it Magic ball”

The terrible first half and bad turnovers really killed the Celtics despite the refjob though, but what I saw in the second half was very promising.

And we do need another big guy to foul Dwight Howard because he is such a terrible free throw shooter, and he should have had two or three more technicals then he did… but that is how I’d deal with him.

Brickowski I disagree. I think inconsistent officiating bothers the worse team more, normally because they are less experienced and let their emotions go.

Maybe we are more open to that since we haven’t played together long …

but as a generalization I think the superior team benefits more.

“Brickowski I disagree. I think inconsistent officiating bothers the worse team more, normally because they are less experienced and let their emotions go.”

Uhh, not if they are the ones benefitting from almost every call.

bigyaz -

To be fair, one of the site editors (not sure who) changed the rticle from about 5-6 paragraphs to 15 and made the jump (it used to be all on the front page) after FierceLikePaulPierce’s comments (not sure if coincidence or cause). The jump aspect is certainly fine, especially after the first night.

The paragraph length? Kind of reminds me of the joke attributed to Yogi Berra when asked whether he would like his pizza cut into 8 slices or 6, Yogi replies “Eight, I’m really hungry.” I mean it’s the same amount of words and reading whther it’s 12 paragraphs or fine.

All kidding aside, FierceLikePaulPierce’s comments are clearly reflective of mainstream journalism and most prose writing, and, thus, may have some validity. Clearly the editor agreed. I also recognize that if an entire article was one paragraph (although, unsurprisingly, I am a fan of James Joyce who who wrote an entire chapter of Ulysses as one sentence) it would be unrelenting, and that pieces of journalism (which the Blog world sometimes follows) use very brief paragraphs (although I see it opposite from FierceLikePaulPierce,I think it is more important in newspapers because of the column structure than it is on a blog). But how long in writing generally is too long is a matter of preference. There are many high end magazine/journals (like say the Atlantic Monthly) that sometimes have articles with very long and dense paragraphs.

I think it goes back to what the purpose of paragraph breaks are, which is why are you deeming that paragraph content as inter-related, which for Petula and I, partially driven by the fact that we write as the game progresses in order to get something up as quickly as possible and partly because of a convention we adopted, is to treat each quarter as a unit of action and character, thus as a single paragraph. I actually think breaking it up as was down above, without using bolded sub-headings (which we would have put in had we known it was going to be edited as such) or rewriting to reflect the breaks, makes the game flow somewhat harder to follow because the reader needs to attend more carefully to quarter ends. But to each his own.

Hank