Jared Sullinger and Gerald Wallace push the Celtics past DeMarcus Cousins and Isaiah Thomas, as Rajon Rondo and Avery Bradley sat out tonight's game.
In a tight and pretty exciting game, the Celtics managed to grind out the win.
Let's just dub the first quarter "Cousins vs Sully at the Garden". The Celtics started looking for Jared early, and him and Cousins kind of took turns hitting and missing both drives and a couple of spot up shots. Overall however, the Kings managed to keep the Celtics behind them, mainly because the Celtics missed a bunch of tough shots. The C's turned it over a fair bit too, but luckily the Kings didn't really manage to convert more than a couple into actual points.
Two freethrow's by Kelly O'Lynyk prevented a ten-point deficit at the end of the half, 21-29.
The second quarter started with the Kings playing fairly poorly and the Celtics capitalising, managing a small lead off of some good offensive plays by O'Lynyk combined with some decent defence. There was a small 10-0 run, which was nice. The second quarter also brought a nice (and slightly short) stretch of basketball where Pressey and Thomas were going at eachother.
A nice detail, our bench outscored theirs 20 to 2 in this half. Though a bit messy, the Celtics managed to end the quarter quite strong, going into half-time at a score of 49-46, scoring 28 to the King's 17.
The second half starts of with some bad defense on the Celtic side and some 4 easy points, but a quick time-out call by Brad Stevens put a stop this, as the Celtics proceeded to score 10 straight points off some strong play by Sullinger. Some inspired play in this quarter by Isaiah Thomas kept the Kings in the game, but Bayless countered with some impressive shooting (5 of 5 up to this point) and the quarter ends with the Celtics up 71-69.
The fourth quarter turned nasty with some pretty questionable reffing, resulting in a squable between Isaiah Thomas and a knocked-down Jerryd Bayless, and later a technical foul on a talkative Gerald Wallace.
The story of the quarter is a one-two punch between great play by Wallace and a great outing by Sullinger, as they use the questionable calls to fuel their play. A 15-0 run pretty much got the Celtics in the clear, going up by as many as 18 points, and taking the game by 10 points.
99 - 89, Celtics.
Some notes:
- It didn't come out in the report above, but Gerald Wallace had a ridiculously good game. In 40 minutes he had 12 rebounds, 9 assists and 8 points, some of which came in key stretches.
- Jared Sullinger was stellar, grabbing 16 rebounds and scoring 31 points on 14-24 shooting.
- DeMarcus Cousins managed 16 rebounds, and 31 points as well, but somehow ended up with a +7 plus-minus score where Sully had the +17. Funny how that's also the difference in the one stat that matters.
- Bayless ended with 19 points and 4 assists, shooting 4-5 from three-point land.
- O'Lynyk did his work on the boards with 9 rebounds, chipping in 11 points and a respectable 5 assists.
- Jeff Green managed 17 points as well, mainly from his drives to the basket, as he hit just 2-8 from three.
- Isaiah Thomas was a manace with 24 points and 6 assists.