Celtics and Nets Are Sputtering to Conclusion

This is not the Golden Age of NBA basketball.

It can’t be if the team with the second-best player in the game (according to MVP voting) blows a 26-point third-quarter lead to a team with two scorers, no center and a point guard of many words and few great accomplishments.

What fun it was to see the greatest-ever playoff comeback. The Boston Celtics get credit for proving that the best of sports is the mental resilience that can be imparted by one optimistic star. Celtic forward Antoine Walker tells his teammates, especially Paul Pierce, to quit the quitting and don’t, to steal from the late Jim Valvano, give up, don’t ever give up. And they didn’t. So good for Walker.

The moment of triumph was emotionally rewarding, but the post-mortem is discouraging.

Jason Kidd, who has had a growing number of supporters (especially on NBC) saying Kidd should have beaten out Tim Duncan as the NBA’s most valuable player, could not keep his New Jersey Nets from losing all of its third-quarter 26-point lead and getting outscored, 41-16, in the fourth quarter.

Kidd, according to some “experts,” may be one of the best point guards ever? They even compared Kidd to Oscar Robertson and Magic Johnson because he had triple-doubles in the first two games of the Eastern Conference finals against Boston.

Can you imagine Robertson or Magic letting their teams lose 26-point leads?

Robertson, 63 years old and missing a kidney, right now might not have let a team do that. Robertson and Magic would have scored 20 points themselves in a fourth quarter if they had to.

Kidd has a large heart, great hustle, an inconsistent shot and the inability to gather enough teammates to follow his lead. Maybe because the other players aren’t good enough. Maybe because Kidd isn’t as good as we want him to be.

It’s pointless to keep looking for the next Michael Jordan and pointless to always refer to Michael moments, but would MJ have ever let his team blow that lead?

If the Nets come back to win the series, if they can throw out the memories of how they blew that lead, if they can convince themselves it was no big deal to become the first team in playoff history to lose a game after leading by 21 points at the end of the third quarter, if they truly believe what happened Saturday was only one loss, it will be the greatest recovery since Lazarus.

And also very disappointing for it will mean the Celtics are less good than imagined.

The Nets didn’t practice Sunday. What would be the point?

They gathered in a hotel ballroom, a sullen, desolate collection of dazed basketball players and were forced to tell us all that they were over Saturday’s debacle and that the epic 94-90 loss didn’t matter.

“We win [today],” Kidd said, “and we’ve accomplished what we set out to do. Win one game here and get home-court advantage back.”

Nobody snickered. At least not so you could hear.

Forward Kenyon Martin was more honest. He suffers everything more visibly and vocally than most players. “It feels as if we lost the series,” Martin said. “But we haven’t yet. We’ve got to find some way to come back, though. If we don’t, as a team, bounce back today, it will carry over until tomorrow. If it carries over until tomorrow, we might as well just pack up and go home for the summer.”

The Nets might as well do that now.

Because the thing is, whatever team wins this series--the happily discombobulated Celtics who lead the best-of-seven affair 2-1 and still aren’t quite sure how, or the Nets who will for a long time be associated with the biggest playoff collapse ever--that team isn’t very good.

If you build yourself a 26-point lead at the Celtic home and you can’t hold on, you have terrible, terrible problems.

The Celtics have two guys who are reliable scorers, Walker and Pierce, the pride of Inglewood High. And until Saturday’s fourth quarter, Pierce had been dangerously off-kilter.

He had shot five of 34 in the previous game and three quarters. And many of the misses weren’t even close.

The Celtics have no center. Tony Battie is listed as one. But he is really a 6-foot-11 forward who would make a nice backup on the Lakers or Kings. He would come in and get some rebounds, inflict some energy on a game, then sit down. Battie isn’t a scorer and he’s not a great defender.

But in the East finals, Battie is lucky. The Nets apparently have no center either. Todd MacCulloch is 7 feet tall.

He played in the NBA Finals last season with the Philadelphia 76ers (which tells you what you need to know about the Eastern Conference) and he sat on the bench for Saturday’s decisive fourth quarter, when the Nets could manage only 16 points and could muster no oomph or anger or desire or shooting.

And if you get yourself into a 26-point hole, at home, against the Nets, you have terrible problems.

Celtic Coach Jim O’Brien acknowledged as much Sunday. “The bad news is, we didn’t play very well,” he said. “That can’t continue if we expect to win the series.”

By O’Brien’s count, the Nets have won eight of the 12 quarters played so far. By O’Brien’s count, the Celtics also aren’t playing NBA championship basketball.

No kidding. Whoever wins the West, flaws and all, would drill these Celtics, magical comebacks and all.

There hasn’t been the jubilation one might have expected out here over the Laker predicament. Maybe because the Nets and Celtics can’t even imagine themselves as NBA champions.

No one has that much imagination.

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Diane Pucin can be reached at diane.pucin@latimes.com.