‘Up and Down’ Play Nags Bird and Celtics

It was a jump shot Larry Bird has made about 4,000 times. The squared-up, dagger-in-the-chest three-pointer that saps the will of haughty teams trying to beat the Boston Celtics.

This night, the Detroit Pistons were trying to rally from a 10-point deficit at home in the final three minutes. In one minute, they had sliced Boston’s lead in half. The Celtics have been quite beatable on the road for a few years now, and even more so this season.

But now Larry Joe Bird had the ball and he was wide open and the game would soon be over.

Except he missed the shot.

“I thought it was going left the whole way,” he said afterward. “I made a mistake. I tried to seam the ball up, which I try to do on every shot, and I didn’t have the ball on my hand the way I wanted.”

Detroit took a two-point lead with three seconds left. Bird didn’t take the last shot. Dee Brown, the second-year guard, did, on a hard-nosed drive to the basket that sent the game into overtime.

The 35-year-old Bird, by his own admission, is in the home stretch of his career, and Boston is working its way through his decline.

Do you let the legend take the last shot, even when he doesn’t come off the screen and bury the jumper so automatically anymore? Or do you give the ball to the kid point guard with the speed and pumped-up explosiveness?

Bird admits that he is incapable of shooting like he used to. His role has changed. The Celtics don’t need him to score as much with Brown, Reggie Lewis and Kevin Gamble around. But they do require his rebounding and passing and presence.

When he’s on the floor, center Robert Parish seems to get much better shots. They still are deadly together on the pick-and-roll, for example. And Boston’s offense doesn’t stagnate.

“When I came back” March 1 from back problems, Bird said, “we were playing very well. We didn’t play great teams, but we had ball movement. We were playing hard. We were doing the things that you have to do to win against the good teams. We go to Miami and play very well in the first quarter. Second quarter everything falls apart. It’s been up and down ever since.

“I thought for a while when I came back that we had it set and we were gonna make a good run. But you never know from day to day now. That’s not good. For a team that’s trying to do well in the playoffs, uncertain . . . is like being inconsistent. If you’re not consistent, you’re not going to win games.”

There’s just a couple of weeks for Coach Chris Ford to try to patch things together. Bird and Kevin McHale, who missed most of the first three months of the season recovering from ankle surgery, are just now getting into some kind of shape.

“It’s just one of those kind of seasons,” Ford said. “It’s an adventure every night. If they get through the game, that’s one step. The next step is how does their body react the next morning? Can they get ready for the next game? They’re strong-willed, determined players. But I don’t know where it’s going to lead us.”

It does appear that the Celtics are going to take a harder line in monitoring Bird’s health. In previous seasons Bird seldom discussed how he felt, even with Boston’s medical staff, and the Celtics--with years of almost macho indifference to pain demonstrated by Bird, McHale and Parish--acquiesced.

Now, he must sit down with Boston’s trainers and doctors and go through what amounts to a weekly checklist.

“He’s the best of worlds and the worst of worlds,” team executive Dave Gavitt said. “The guy is so incredible. But the risk you run is that Larry tends to mask his symptoms, or try to blow through them. “Larry’s trying to be honest. Sometimes he might not ‘fess up as much as we’d like him to. But . . . he seems to be more relaxed talking about things. I think Larry views this as ‘This is my life after basketball.’ ”

He signed a two-year contract extension in the fall, meaning he and McHale and Parish should be around through 1994. But Boston’s hopes will be tied to the moments in the early morning when he prioritizes his aches and pains.

There are moments when the feeling comes back and Bird is young and brash again, like when he scored 49 points against Portland and played 54 minutes, including two overtimes. The problem comes the next day.

“You just wake up the next morning and see how you feel,” he said.

He’s a walking bandage. The right ankle is bad. The right thigh is bad. The back, well, you know about the back, surgically repaired over the summer to relieve agonizing pain.

That came after all the trouble with his heels two years ago (“It would take you five minutes before you were able to move. Them days are over, hopefully”), the most severe sign that his body was starting to break down.

But the Celtics still need him if they’re going to go beyond either the first or second round of the upcoming playoffs.