A few rambling thoughts after putting the Brandon Sun to bed here at roughly 1:49 a.m. Central Daylight Time, the extended hours the product of an NHL playoff game that just wouldn’t stop. The NHL playoffs are the bane of existence for Canadian newspapers, as entertaining as they can be. Dallas’ 4OT win over San Jose on a Sunday that stretched into Monday was a shining example.

But with the waiting game complete (until the next marathon), we can turn attention away from the ice to set our sights on the conference semifinals in the Association and, most interestingly perhaps, the Boston Celtics.

We’re not ready to prefix the Cs with the word “mighty” just yet, although their punking of the Atlanta Hawks in a season-on-the-line contest on Sunday was worthy of an adjective of some sort. But, as it stands now with Boston advancing to play Cleveland in the Eastern semi, the adjective has to be “inconsistent”, or some derivative thereof.

If we’re talking about just the first round — and we realize that one round does not a post-season make — the Celtics are easily, far and away — like different planets in different solar systems — the most perplexing team in the NBA. As the teams returned to Boston to play that Game 7 on Sunday, there could not have been many people outside of the Peach State that truly, seriously believed the Atlanta Hawks had a hope in heaven’s name of winning that game. Sure, you can toss out any cliches you want about how anything can happen in a one-game series, but that simply isn’t going to fly here. The Hawks had no chance. They were 12-29 on the road in the regular season, the visiting team had not won a game in this series and — c’mon — was the best team in the NBA seriously going to lose a series-ending game in their own gym especially when those recently-long-deprived lunatic fans were behind them? (Lunatic said as a term of endearment here). The Hawks put any doubt to rest early on hitting just six field goals in the first quarter and finishing an embarrassing 29 per cent from the field for the day.

No instead a bigger question than “who’s going to win Game 7?” was … “why in the hell are we watching a Game 7?” If we played this series 10 more times, how many times does it even get to five games? Once? Twice?

Yet here were the NBA’s regular season juggernauts going to the max against a team that couldn’t even get its record to the magical .500 mark in the watered-down East. Kevin Garnett — specifically in Game 6 when his team had a chance to sew things up the first time — was again shirking the responsibility of taking over a game he had every business dominating and deferring to his teammates in crunchtime. Garnett’s a beast, OK? But his “pump, pump, pass” routine in fourth quarters is fairly unbecoming of one of the great power forwards still in search of a legacy.

When the Celtics play — truly play — they’re scary and they flexed a lot of that Sunday. Say what you want, but that was still an NBA team (barely) that they held to 68 points and a junior high-like 43 through three quarters.
One moment that stood out in a game that was pretty much devoid of anything memorable (save for Marvin Williams’ mid-air tackle of Rajon Rondo), was Garnett’s hard pick on Zaza Pachulia in the fourth quarter. Pachulia famously stood up to Garnett in a Game 4 scuffle that was one of a few moments this series where the Hawks refused to play the role of punching bag. (And while we’re here: How Garnett escaped unscathed by both the media and NBA disciplinary committee after shoving referee Eddie F. Rush is laughable). But Garnett got his final shot in on Pachulia when he blindsided the Georgian (from the other Georgia) with a shoulder to the grill in a play that had nothing to do with setting a screen. But Pachulia, who had earned the respect of all the little guys around the world by previously not taking the crap of the imposing Garnett, cowered away this time around like Cliff Clavin in that Cheers’ episode when the other postal worker wanted to whup him. Not that The Scrum is in the business of promoting fisticuffs or condoning pro athletes snap and go the way of Kermit Washington and start swinging on opposition, but Pachulia got his back up momentarily and then slinked away.

Perhaps it was pointless at that juncture, but his body language represented the rest of the team.

And this was who the Celtics toyed with for three out of seven games?

Ironically the Celtics are likely on a crash course with another team that seems to turn it off and on when it feels like it, should they knock off Cleveland and then have the oft-uninterested Detroit Pistons get past the over-matched Orlando Magic in the other semifinal.

There’s again no logical reason (other than the one named LeBron) why Boston should fall short of playing for the Eastern berth into the NBA championship.

But who can tell? They’ve defied logic a few times already.