Heading into Thursday night, home teams were 49-15 in the playoffs, including a 19-1 mark in the conference semifinals. “I hate to throw other teams out, but I don’t think anyone is playing very well on the road in the playoffs,” Celtics coach Doc Rivers said. “We’re going to get one. When, I don’t know when. It would be great if it was Game 6, but if not, we come back here, and we’re just going to keep playing.”
NBA. Have you heard the one about the team that couldn’t win on the road in the playoffs?
So have the Celtics, and they’re getting pretty sick of it.
“There’s no place like home for us,” said forward Leon Powe, whose Celtics are 7-0 at home and 0-5 on the road in the postseason heading into Friday’s Game 6. “The record shows it, but we still are going to have to get one on the road eventually to get the monkey off our back. We want people to stop asking us about it, seeing it on TV.”
In order for everyone to move on, though, the Celtics must stop face-planting over this major hurdle, which seems to grow with each road defeat. Their transgressions against the Hawks were innocent enough, as Atlanta never posed the slightest threat at the Garden.
And no harm, no foul against the Cavs, at least so far. Obviously, the Celtics have the luxury of homecourt advantage and don’t have to win on the road to capture the title, but the pressure to continuously hold serve at the Garden will eventually take its toll.
Their poise has already been flawed in tight games in Atlanta and Cleveland. But if the Celtics are staring in the face of a home loss in the game’s waning minutes, they could potentially be fighting to win two games at once with the thoughts of road failures creeping into their heads.
On the surface, the answers to the Celtics’ road woes seem so trivial: stay intense on defense, maintain aggression on offense and don’t lose sight of pounding the ball inside with Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce.
For a team that’s had little trouble sticking to that plan at home, it’s clear there’s a mental block that is acting like a sixth man for the opposing team on the road.
“We’ve got our work cut out for us as we go out here on the road and try to close it out, which is the most important thing for us right now,” Pierce said. “We’ve got to work on somehow, some way to close out this series.”