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I think this series against the Hawks was really good for the C's. It tested their mettle, gave them some valuable Playoff experience early and (hopefully) shut up a bunch of frontrunning fans who crowned this team the Champions back in December. Now we're more humble, experienced and probably became more resilient as a team.

There was no need for this team to peak against Atlanta. The good news is that this team responded when their back was against the wall. They're more prepared now. It's all good for the C's. Now, if only Doc can wake up and realize that Pierce is only 30 and doesn't need to sit out for 6-8 minute stretches between quarters, we'll be all set.

lets just pray we can win some road games

One big worry, given the coach and the newness of the collection of players, was whether playoff adjustments would be slow or inept.

This series confirmed that having practice in that area was needed ....

I agree. In a way it was good to be exposed a little. When you get exposed, you can go back and fix your mistakes. Hopefulley Boston grew from this series.

Without the refrees this series would have been worth 5 games, this team has to learn how to play against the refree, noboby is gonna like the Celtics winning games.

the refs were terrible in atlanta. it wasn't just that they were calling it tight (which i hate in the 'offs) but that they were only calling it tight against the c's, while pierce and kg were getting killed under the hoop and nothing was called. the imbalance was horrible. i actually like the game 7 reffing a lot. let em play. pierce got mad but in the end i thin kthat favors the c's. it definitely favors the better team.

If we thought the refs were horrible in the Atlanta series, wait until Tuesday when David Stern's Golden Child comes to town.

Big Baby wrote:If we thought the refs were horrible in the Atlanta series, wait until Tuesday when David Stern's Golden Child comes to town.

I agree, but hopefully he will be the only one protected.

I think they'll win games 1 and 2 by solid 10-20 points each game.

What I think they should dedicate a lot of time to is learning to play playoff road team defense by watching tapes of where they are successful and where they need to have some bend to their defense to avoid ticky tack hometown fouls. They can score with the best of them, and shoot free throws pretty well too. Keep a lead, shoot free throws, win on the road.

The only real positives I see from this series is we stuck it to David Stern, forcing a game 7 after only 3 games were scheduled in one week just cause the league expected this series to be a 4 game sweep. And we gained extra fan revenue in the process.

But as much as we saw dominant performance's like today's in the regular season, we also saw many of the problems we saw during the 3 games in Atlanta, and we saw no signs of underlying causes going away. And if that continues, we'll have some trouble from here on out.

Big Baby wrote:If we thought the refs were horrible in the Atlanta series, wait until Tuesday when David Stern's Golden Child comes to town.

I agree with what everyone is saying about the awful reffing in Atlanta. Either call it one way or none at all. Interesting the refs only let the Atlanta crowds get into their heads, hmm??

And also, my brother and I were talking about this last night, if we thought it sucked now, just wait and see what LeBron will get away with!

Good teams win despite the officiating, though. Just make sure no one bitch-slaps LeBron in the mouth and gets tossed like Darius Songalia did. What a stupid thing to do!

Washington roughed him up pretty bad, for all the good it did them!