BOSTON – This is why the Nets are going back to the Finals, why even the prospect of facing Detroit in the next round without home-court advantage won’t faze them even a little bit. This is why the Nets are the class of the Eastern Conference, regardless of what the seedings say.
Because on a night when all of Boston was ready for them – Byron Scott might say the city was “juiced” for them – the Nets looked as comfortable as if they were playing a pickup game in the park, losers buy the keg.
In thumping the Celtics, 94-76, in seizing a 3-0 lead in this best-of-seven Eastern Conference semifinal, in silencing a FleetCenter crowd that so desperately wanted to bury them, the Nets made what might have been the definitive statement of these playoffs, one that no doubt ricocheted throughout the corridors of their confernce:
Remember one thing, boys. The trophy’s still ours.
The fans came early and they came loud, they came to boo Scott until they were blue in the face and to chant “Wife-beater!” at Jason Kidd, somehow managing to put that piece of business off until late in the third quarter, by which time the Nets already had raced to a 20-point lead.
The Celtics themselves trotted out as many of the men responsible for hanging those banners as they could round up. Out came Red Auerbach. Out came Bob Cousy, and John Havlicek, and K.C. Jones.
Maybe this kind of stuff used to work in the old days, when the Celtics could lock the windows in the visiting locker room, cut off all the hot water pipes, and send Larry Bird, Kevin McHale and Robert Parrish out to fight the invading infidels.
It works a lot less effectively when Tony Delk, Walter McCarty and Antoine Walker are the ones asked to defend the honor of Celtic Pride.
And it looks even worse when you throw the increasingly confident likes of Richard Jefferson, Kenyon Martin and Kidd into the fray. There might have been a time when the Nets were frightened by loud noises, angry fans and the occasional Paul Pierce hot streak.
Actually, we can identify that time perfectly: last year, Game 3 of the Eastern Conference Finals, the Saturday before Memorial Day, when the Nets blew a 21-point fourth quarter lead to the Celtics, when it looked like they all might crawl up into the fetal position before it was done.
This time, the Nets’ lead was only 20 after three. The Celtics quickly shaved that to 14. The Nets, just as quickly, pushed it back to 20, then to 25. That’s what these Nets do now. They come after you on the road, twice as hard as when they play you at home. Hostile crowds don’t bother them. If anything, they bolster them.
After all, they’ve experienced the full fury of fan wrath before, all the way up the corporate flow chart. Hell, Rod Thorn used to feel it every morning when he’d take the MetroNorth train down from Rye to his old midtown office when he was the NBA’s dean of discipline.
Every day he’d sit next to a stockbroker who would knowingly peer his eyes over the top of his neatly folded newspaper, or stand next to a construction worker with coffee stains all over his orange-and-blue Knicks sweatshirt. Nobody was shy about sharing what was on his mind.
“After that Knicks-Heat series when the Knicks were up three games to one, then they had the fight, then I had to suspend all those players, yeah, people were angry as heck at me and they let me know all the time,” Thorn, the Nets’ GM, said yesterday.
But he lived with it, same as his team lives – make that thrives – with it now.
It’s something they’ll carry with them, all the way back to the Finals.
