Bird: This Is As Low As It Gets

Forty-five minutes after he’d walked off a basketball court for the last time this season, Larry Bird, wearing slacks and a black short-sleeve pullover, made his way from the sanctity of the trainer’s room to the table in the middle of the Celtics dressing room. Some two dozen media members who’d been surrounding the table for 30 minutes, because it is the place from which Bird delivers his state of the union pronouncements, fell silent as Bird threaded his way through the notebooks and minicams and plopped down.

“This is about as low as it gets since I’ve been here,” said Bird, who has been here 11 years. “We played hard, but we were a step behind all day. I kept waiting for us to run off 10-12 points, but it never happened. You talk to all the players, there’s shock. I’ll wake up (Monday) and I’ll still be in shock. This is unbelievable.”

If you hold statistics dear, this, a 121-114 Knicks victory that eliminated the Celtics from the playoffs, is unbelievable. After all, the Celtics have won more championships (16) than any NBA team, and Sunday they earned the dubious honor of becoming only the third team in the league’s 44-year history to lose a best-of-five playoff series after leading, 2-0.

What’s more, the Celtics had beaten the Knicks 26 consecutive times at Boston Garden, a streak that goes back to the last Knicks victory here on Feb. 29, 1984 -- a leap year day that doesn’t even exist on the calendar three out of four years. Trent Tucker is the only member of the current Knicks to have tasted victory at Boston Garden while wearing a Knicks uniform.

If you hold the Celtics so dear to your heart that it blurs your objectivity, Sunday’s loss was also unbelievable. At halftime, with the Celtics clinging to a 54-50 lead and in no way looking like the dominant team, one of my dearest friends, who has lived here all his life and has miniature Celtics world championship banners hanging from the track lighting in his living room, came down from the stands and confidently informed me that “Bird will probably take over in the fourth quarter.”

For the loyal subjects, it is hard, and in some cases, too painful, to acknowledge that Larry Bird, 33, can no longer take over a game whenever he pleases. It is hard, and painful, for Celtics fans to acknowledge that Bird and his future Hall of Fame teammates are aged heroes who no longer enjoy the divine right of kings. In certain situations, like their dazzling 157-128 victory in Game 2, they can still shine like royalty. But in the end, and all too often these days, their best efforts go begging.

“The intensity was there,” Bird admitted, thereby ruining the apologists’ angle that the Celtics somehow came out ‘flat’. “The fact was, we couldn’t get that step we needed.”

That’s because the step they needed was gone, perhaps forever. Robert Parish is 36, Dennis Johnson 35, Kevin McHale 32, Bird 33. Even with 24-year-old Reggie Lewis in tow, the Celtics are the oldest starting five in the NBA. Except for Lewis, you could read a book in the time it took any of them to singlehandedly create their own open shot against the Knicks these last three games. It didn’t help that the Knicks bench outscored the Celtics reserves, 27-4. As the game wore on--the Celtics ironmen played on--less effectively.

Bird was a prime example. He led the Celtics with 31 points but made only one field goal (1-for-6 from the field) in the fourth quarter. In the final 11 minutes of the game he was scoreless from the field.

He and the Celtics also had the exhausting assignment of trying to counteract the tireless Patrick Ewing, who, at 27, is saying hello to superstardom just as Bird is starting to say goodby.

Ewing, who scored 44 points and tied a Knicks playoff record for steals--he had seven--in Game 4, had 31 points, 10 assists and eight rebounds in Game 5. He also had four blocked shots, and forced the Celtics to alter, and miss, perhaps five others.

Ewing also drove the stake through the Celtics’ heart when he launched a three-pointer in front of the Knicks bench.