LOS ANGELES // The beautiful people mostly stayed until the end, trading perplexed looks at courtside as if waiting for someone to come forward and offer them an explanation. The numbers simply did not add up, either on Kobe Bryant's stat sheet or the huge scoreboard overhead.
The realisation was settling in that not only was the home-court advantage gone, but the Boston Celtics were not. The Los Angeles Lakers would soon be off to Boston, where the series resumes tonight and where the deciding games for the NBA championship could now conceivably play out. All because the best guard on the court on this night was not wearing No 24, and the best coach on this night could not stay in his seat.
Rajon Rondo, the Boston guard, will get most of the credit for evening up the series to 1-1, with three games scheduled over the next week in Boston. He took over at the stage of the game that Bryant usually does, and led the Celtics from behind in the final six minutes to a relatively stress-free 103-94 finish. But give Doc Rivers, the Boston coach, a pat on the back for a play-off moment of his own.
If he had not run out on to the court to frantically call a timeout with the Celtics hanging on to a precarious lead with 1min 26secs left, the ending to Sunday's game could have been quite different. "I'm glad they saw me," Rivers said. "I don't think they had a choice but to see me. I was past them." The sprint on to the court saved the Celtics a possession they converted seconds later. Just as important, perhaps, it made his players laugh.
"As big as that little moment was, I actually thought that the bigger moment was all the players were laughing at me and it allowed them to breathe a little bit," Rivers said. "I thought that helped us." Over on the opposing bench, Phil Jackson was not quite sure what to think. "I think coaches have to be on the sidelines. They're not supposed to be on the floor," Jackson said. "It's like he was shot out of a starter's block."
Jackson got a laugh out of his quip, but there was not a lot to laugh about, even for a coach with 10 championship rings. Not when his star player was hobbled with five fouls in the final minutes, and Ron Artest kept making puzzling decisions even as his shots clanged off the rim. His players were not in much of a joking mood, either, as they faced having to fly to Boston with the home court advantage gone.
Bryant answered questions only briefly and in a monotone, clearly disgusted with how things had gone so sour. He scored 21 points and battled with foul trouble, while Rondo energised Boston down the stretch and finished with 19 points, 12 rebounds and 10 assists. "It's a series," Bryant said. "You're trying to stay even-keel. You don't get too high, don't get too low after a win or a loss. You just go into the next one and take care of business."
Pau Gasol tried harder to provide some analysis, but even the Lakers' most cerebral forward had trouble explaining it all. "We're in the NBA finals," Gasol said. "They just played better than we did." That was not the case in Game 1 when the Lakers so manhandled Boston that some predicted the series was already over. And even with Rondo having a hand in seemingly every play, most of the 18,997 fans probably thought the Lakers had things in hand when Bryant hit a fade away jumper with a little over five minutes left to give the home team a 90-87 lead.
They did not because things changed a lot between games. On this night, the Celtics were the aggressors, and so was their coach. "He claimed that he's in shape, and when he ran out there we told him he looked like he wasn't in shape," said Ray Allen, who scored 27 points in first half, but only five in the second half. "But he made it out there, so it definitely got us an extra possession." Kevin Garnett was so excited about it that he gave his coach a celebratory body bump before feeding the ball to Kendrick Perkins for a lay-up on the inbounds play.
And, with Bryant seemingly out of sorts because of foul trouble, Boston did not have any trouble holding on to the lead built behind Allen's finals record eight three-pointers and Rondo's triple double. That left what had been a dispirited Celtics team feeling pretty good about itself heading back to Boston. With a split on the away court, the Celtics have three consecutive games at home to put their mark on the series and avoid a trip back to Los Angeles.
* AP
