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Celtics win Game 7 easily, advance to play Cavaliers

Kevin Garnett leads blowout of Hawks, but Cleveland and LeBron James await in the conference semifinals

By Ken Berger
Newsday

BOSTON -- With 3:05 left in the third quarter Sunday, Kevin Garnett converted a layup, absorbed a foul from Zaza Pachulia and stood under the basket to tell the fans what they already knew.

"It's over," Garnett mouthed, his words preceded by an expletive and punctuated with a throat-slash gesture that might earn him a fine he will gladly pay.

At this point, it was 70-36 for the home team, which meant two things: This Game 7 was way too big for the Atlanta Hawks, and the fans of New England finally saw a team perform worse on the parquet this season than the New York Knicks.

It ended with a 99-65 victory for the Boston Celtics, who easily prevented their 66-win regular season from spinning clockwise in a commode. But if this makes sense, getting pushed to a surprising seventh game was not really a test for the Celtics. It was more a warmup for their fans, who broke out in song with such stadium classics as "U-S-A!" for Pachulia, and "Where is Bib-by?" for the Hawks' point guard who was tucked safely on the bench the entire fourth quarter.

As witty/tasteless as those ventures into arena chanting were, the next few bars we heard at TD Banknorth Garden might go down as famous last words.

"Bring on Cleve-land," they began, polishing off the afternoon with something I'm not sure I agree with. "We want Cleve-land."

Do they?

Well, that's who the Celtics get. And you can bet LeBron James will make Celtics fans sweat even more than the Hawks did.

"I don't know what message the rest of the league got," Garnett said. "But this is our home court, we're comfortable here, and this is how we play here. We don't play for anyone else but ourselves."

Garnett and Celtics coach Doc Rivers, too, seemed impressed with their seventh-game performance, but what were they doing in that predicament to begin with?

"This has to be something that we continue," Garnett said.

But the Cavs don't have anyone as erratic as Marvin Williams, who took out Rajon Rondo on a breakaway layup as though he were playing safety in the NFL, thus earning a flagrant-two and ejection less than three minutes into the third quarter.

They don't have anyone whose rhetoric is as empty as Pachulia's. He goes nose-to-nose with Garnett in Game 4, then takes a charge from Garnett on Sunday and does the Dikembe Mutombo finger wag -- with the Hawks trailing 70-39.

A much more difficult series, against a far superior opponent, begins Tuesday in the same building.

"When we play like that," Garnett said afterward, "it's pretty hard to beat us. The only question is consistency."

Does this mean the Celtics are back? That they've awakened from their first-round slumber?

Not necessarily. The inevitable discussion about whether Garnett can carry a team on his back through a tough playoff series has been postponed, though not squelched.

The Celtics didn't even need Garnett on Sunday, which is good because he claimed he didn't sleep at all the night before. (Rivers said he got 10 hours, courtesy of Ambien.) But they will need Garnett in the next round. If he doesn't deliver, the accusations that resurfaced after Garnett passed up so many shots in the fourth quarter of Game 6 will come back again.

"The good, the bad, the ugly," Celtics veteran P.J. Brown said. "The playoffs expose everything."

It's not clear yet if the Celtics were exposed for taking so long to dispense with the scattershot Hawks. But if Pachulia could keep Garnett up all night, what about LeBron James?

"The times I've played against KG, he's been clutch," Brown said. "What I've seen from him, he can get it done."

Rivers downplayed a pregame chat he had with Garnett, calling it "just checking in." The reality is, Garnett is going to have to do a lot more in the next round for the Celtics to get where they're trying to go. He better get some sleep.