Saturday, February 19, 2011

LeBron James changes teams but still hits the same roadblock: the Boston Celtics

James is 0-3 against the Celtics this season and is questioning whether the grand team he, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh came together to create is any better than the Cavs team he left last season.

lebron james.JPGView full sizeLeBron James, center, and the Miami Heat are winless against the Boston Celtics this season.
Brian Windhorst / Special to The Plain Dealer

MIAMI, Fla. — LeBron James' nightmares all seem to start in the dank and cold TD Garden in Boston.

The personality-less gym built on top of a train station and decked out in Boston Bruins colors has been where James' dreams have gone to die over the past several years of his career. Grim results in that building were part of the reason he left the Cavaliers last summer because, he apparently thought, he couldn't get past the Celtics' green monster with that team.

This weekend might be a standard James All-Star party, complete with his high-fashion and celebrity-laden dinner with Jay-Z. But last weekend was no fun at all -- that was when James had to accept the reality that his supposed coup might not pay off as fast as he and his Miami Heat teammates thought.

James was personally hit hard by the Heat's 85-82 loss to the Celtics last Sunday. First, it came with Boston significantly banged up. Injuries to the majority of their reserves left them using just seven core players, though four of them were All-Stars.

Second, the Heat arrived on a hot streak, winning eight in a row. James himself was sizzling, too, coming off back-to-back Player of the Week honors and a Player of the Month selection that had people starting to talk about him winning a third consecutive Most Valuable Player award.

But by the end of that afternoon, James was staring at an 0-3 record against the Celtics this season and questioning whether the grand team James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh came together to create was any better than the Cavs team he left last season.

"I'm upset," James said after the defeat. "I wanted to win, we all wanted to win."

James was upset indeed. His disappointment after the game was one of the most pronounced of any regular-season loss in his career and carried over until the next day in Indianapolis, where James said at a practice it was difficult to relive the experience watching game film.

"I've got the same feeling right now as I had in my third year or my fourth year when we continued to play Detroit and could not get over the hump," James said. "It took a long time for us to finally get over the hump. I've been in this position before."

James and Wade referenced their issues with the Pistons, actually. The Cavs lost to the Pistons in the playoffs in 2006 and then lost three times to them in the 2006-07 season before rallying from 0-2 down to win the '07 Eastern Conference Finals.

When the Heat won the 2006 NBA title, it came after they had lost to the Pistons in the playoffs in 2005, and they had to beat them to reach the Finals -- an experience Wade remembers well.

While that history lesson has some merit to the current situation, it is not how James and Wade planned this season to go. When they signed in Miami, taking pay cuts to make it work, it wasn't under the belief they would wait for teams such as the Celtics, Lakers and Spurs to age so it could be their time. It was with the understanding that the Heat would start winning titles instantly.

There is still a long way to go this season, and it is impossible to predict injuries or momentum swings. But right now, it seems to be a hard sell that the Heat could beat the Celtics in a playoff series, which puts James and Wade in the same position they were in a season ago when both were eliminated by Boston.

"This is classic, typical, bigger brothers; you've got to get over it," Wade said. "We've got plenty of time, it can happen in the playoffs. That's when we'd like it to happen anyway."

There are signs the Heat's big-three idea is working and is going to be a force to be dealt with in the league for a while. After struggling initially, the Heat hit the All-Star break having gone 31-7 since Dec. 1.

Combined, James, Wade and Bosh are averaging 70 points per game on nearly 50 percent shooting, easily making them the most productive and dynamic threesome in the NBA. But issues with the supporting cast -- key reserves Mike Miller and Udonis Haslem have had injury problems, and the center and point guard spots continue to be unsteady -- don't have the Heat as the favorite for anything except its division title this season.

That was not part of the thought process last summer when there was smoke and fire on the stage in July.

"We know that Boston is in our way of getting to the Finals," James said. "They're the team we're all still trying to catch."

Source: http://www.cleveland.com/cavs/index.ssf/2011/02/lebron_james_changes_teams_but.html

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