Because there's always a silver lining...
Bad News - The Celtics lost.
Good News - The series is still 1-1
Bad News - The Pistons have been to the ECF for each of the last 6 years.
Good News - Their combined record for those games is just 13 - 18.
Bad News - The Pistons shot 49.3% from the field.
Good News - Hey, our defense can't play any worse than that, right?
Bad News - Our bench didn't give us much of anything last night (8 points).
Good News - Other than Rodney Stucky, their bench was pretty quiet too.
Bad News - Rumors of Chauncey Billups demise were greatly exaggerated.
Good News - Ray Allen is BACK!
Bad News - You can tell Rasheed Wallace is starting to get on track.
Good News - Kevin Garnett has been on track from the start.
Bad News - The Celtics road record is the storyline that refuses to go away.
Good News - The Celtics can do something about that on Saturday.
Bottom Line Bad News - The Pistons are who we thought they were. They never panic and they wait for you to make a mistake and then they pounce on you. The Celtics dug this road record hole themselves and now they have to face the questions about how they intend to win this series if they can't win on the road and just lost home court advantage. The defense looked tired and slow and it isn't like there's a lot of time to rest before Saturday's game 3.
Bottom Line Good News - This is about as good as the Pistons can play and the Celtics were still right there. A typical good game from Detroit has them spreading the scoring around to several different players, playing smothering defense, and showing poise under pressure to win the game. All those things happened last night, but the Celtics still had their opportunities to win the game - they just couldn't sieze them. At the end of the day, I still believe that the Celtics are the more talented, more driven team and in a seven game series the better team typically wins out. And if we have Ray Allen back to normal, I like our chances a lot.