NBA:In this house of horrors, where his championship dreams died so many times, where his career arc was indelibly dented, where he shed his Cleveland Cavaliers jersey for the final time, LeBron James stepped out, stared into the abyss and scoffed at the darkness.
The dream would not die again on the TD Garden parquet, not this spring, not without James authoring one of the most brilliant performances in his brilliant career. Facing elimination and a second straight year without taking a title to South Beach, James summoned the dominant scorer within last night, putting 45 points on the board in a 98-79 Miami Heat victory over the Boston Celtics, tying the Eastern Conference finals at 3-3.
The conference championship will be decided tomorrow night in Miami. The winner will meet the Oklahoma City Thunder in the finals starting next Tuesday."He was absolutely fearless tonight," Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said. "And it was contagious."
It was a career-defining performance, one that should - for the moment, anyway - stifle well-worn narratives about shrinking under pressure. James was assertive, steady and clear in his mission, from the opening tipoff until the 45-minute mark, when he finally sat down, the game well in hand.
This was James' sixth game with at least 45 points, but his first in a Heat uniform. His blistering shooting (19 for 26) made this the most efficient performance in the set. He scored more than half of the Heat's field goals."It's a great feeling to be in, when you feel like everything you put up is going in," James said. "But you can never let go. You can never let it die down or anything like that."
James did not. He opened with a 14-point first quarter as the Heat staked out an early double-digit lead. He added 16 points in the second and 11 in the third. He slowed down in the fourth only because the lead reached 25 points. He also had 15 rebounds and five assists.
"I hope now you guys can stop talking about LeBron and that he doesn't play in big games," Celtics coach Doc Rivers said, lightheartedly scolding the news media. "He was pretty good tonight. Now that's to bed."
As a rule, James shuns the notion that he would ever try to take over a game. He views himself as more playmaker than scorer, more Magic than Michael. Yet his words conveyed a different mindset as he contemplated this moment."I'm looking forward to it probably more than anyone on the team," he said before the game.
If James was at all pleased to quiet his critics, he did not show it. There was no defiance in his tone or self-satisfaction in his gaze. He did not smile on the podium or make any wild proclamations about his achievement. He said he had not even listened to the chatter on sports talk shows, preferring to read and watch movies in his down time. James has been reading "Mockingjay," the third book in the "Hunger Games" series, in the locker room before recent games.
"I don't really hear the outside noise of what's said about me, or what's said about our team," James said. From start to finish, James controlled the game, scoring from seemingly every floorboard - on dunks and baseline fadeaways, from the paint and from the arc (2 for 4), powering a Heat offense that had few other options.
Dwyane Wade scored 17 points but again struggled with his accuracy (6 for 17). No other Miami player scored in double digits. Chris Bosh, playing his second game since returning from an abdominal strain, logged 28 minutes, finishing with seven points and six rebounds off the bench.
Rajon Rondo led Boston with 21 points and 10 assists but was the only Celtics star to play like one. Paul Pierce missed 14 of his 18 attempts and finished with nine points. Kevin Garnett, whose inside play was a key to the Celtics' revival in this series, had just 12 points while going 6 for 14. Ray Allen had 10 points.
When the Celtics most needed an efficient game, their offence went stagnant. Boston shot 42.7 per cent."Each guy wanted to win the game for us - which is a good trait," Rivers said, "but the bad trait is there was no ball movement."
So the Celtics are now facing elimination, too, and the very real possibility that they are preparing for their final game as a group. A victory would send the Celtics to their third finals in five seasons. A loss might mean the end of the Big Three, and the departures of Allen and Garnett.
For James, that would be a poetic finish. Twice in the last five years, the Pierce-Garnett-Allen Celtics ruined James' postseason, both times on the parquet. They knocked out his Cavaliers in 2008 and again in 2010 - the series that ended James' Cleveland career. He signed with the Heat two months later to form his own Big Three with Wade and Chris Bosh, to finally vanquish his playoff demons.
Now, James is one victory from making a second straight trip to the finals, the third of his career."It was great to see him come out and lead this team the way he did today," Wade said. "We just gave him the ball and got out of the way."
No matter the outcome, James had the most at stake, his reputation seemingly riding on every shot. So he took a lot of them.James attacked the heart of Boston's defense for a pair of early dunks, hit a series of tough fadeaways and scored 30 of Miami's 55 points in the first half. He missed just two shots in 14 attempts. He handled the ball on nearly every possession and frustrated every defender the Celtics sent at him, from Pierce to Brandon Bass to Mickael Pietrus.
On consecutive possessions, James pump-faked Pierce and then Rondo into the air, drawing fouls on both and sending Pierce to the bench with his third. When the Celtics got within eight points, James extended the lead with a flying putback dunk. When the lead dipped to nine, he hit a difficult 18-foot fadeaway.
By tipoff, the Heat had already absorbed two days of anticipatory eulogies and a thousand theories on what had gone wrong. "It wasn't the end of the world," Spoelstra said. "Nobody likes getting dirt thrown on your face before you're not even dead." New York Times Service