It just didn’t feel quite right Monday night, the start of this Boston-Philadelphia NBA Eastern Conference semifinal series, especially since the Celtics’ 117-101 win was hardly indicative of so many of the previous 100 playoff games between these two franchises.
Yet regardless of who ultimately wins this 20th playoff matchup between them, for those of us old enough to remember the Celtics’ Bill Russell battling the 76ers’ Wilt the Stilt Chamberlain in the 1960s, or Larry Bird against Dr. J in the 1980s, a trip to the NBA Finals always on the line, this is all arriving a bit too soon and with too little edginess.
Nor is it only the playoff round. The rickety old Boston Garden of suffocating heat and “Havlicek stole the ball” and a parquet floor filled with dead spots to do in the visitors is nothing more than a distant memory, replaced by the modern palace known as TD Garden.
Heck, even though Boston’s timeless uniforms still look the same most of the time as those worn by past Celtics legends, they never wear black shoes anymore, which the late, great Red Auerbach demanded, insisting they made his team look slower than they were. And who’s to argue with a guy who won nine NBA titles in 10 seasons as a head coach from 1956 until his retirement at the close of the 1966 season?
Now it’s the games that have grown slower, what with the action seeming to stop every two minutes for referees to huddle around instant-replay screens while some Oz-like figure in Secaucus, N.J. – seriously, Secaucus, which is Algonquian for “place of snakes,” as any Indiana Pacers fan surely would attest after Indy’s loss to Cleveland this past week – gives the final verdict.