IN A NUTSHELL
The Boston Celtics wanted payback tonight. Their beating at the hands of the New York Knicks still stood out fairly fresh in their collective memory, as it was barely two weeks ago—back when the Boston sports media was inevitably turning A Pretty Underwhelming Start to the Season into THE END OF THE FUCKING WORLD. New York smacked them around fair and square, along with some other good teams before and after Boston (New Orleans and Memphis), but their talent paucity is too great for that to be sustainable, and the Cs had started bouncing back from their swoon.