Miami Heat and Boston Celtics gear up for semi final matchup in the NBA Playoffs
The Miami Heat will meet the Boston Celtics in a playoff series that has been anticipated since the season began. Miami and Boston are giants of the Eastern Conference and the regular season was a good preview of what was to come. Boston’s famed Big Three
looked on with intent in the pre-season as Miami recruited a Big Three of their own. The lines were drawn a long time ago.
When Lebron James and Chris Bosh came to Miami among much fan fare to join Dwayne Wade, many people immediately realized what it meant. It meant that the big boys of the East, Boston, now had some serious company.
Boston coach Doc Rivers attested to the fact that he knew this was coming, "We assumed, when they put this team together, at some point that if we wanted to put another banner up that we were probably going to have to go through them."
Two teams with aspirations for the NBA crown now stand in each other’s way. The series has been expected and as Paul Pierce aptly put it, "It's finally here."
There is a lot riding on the matchup with a lot of interesting subplots. Chris Bosh and Lebron James came here to win the NBA championship and Dwyane Wade wants to go back to the Finals after he won it all in 2006. It’s a chance for revenge too as Wade was
eliminated in the first round by the Celtics last season. It’s a new team but they have good chemistry and they are hungry for success.
Wade, having won it before, would have been expected to draw parallels with the 2006 run but he doesn’t. Talking about the series he said, “It's a different time, different players, different moment."
Well, not for the Celtics.
They have pretty much the same team as 2008 when they won the championship or 2010 when they lost it in the seven-game long finals against the Los Angeles Lakers. The soul of the team, the Big Three of Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce and Ray Allen, are all still
here and so is Rajon Rondo.
Of course there’s Shaquille O’Neal, who won the NBA crown with Wade and the Heat back in 2006. He could be a big factor in the series.
The Heat want this bad, in the words of Chris Bosh, "This is what we came here for,” but the Celtics won’t let go of their domination without a fight. That is what this series is going to be, an all out brawl. It will not be for the faint hearted. The matchups
are fascinating, with Garnett vs. Bosh, Pierce vs. Lebron, Wade vs. Rondo or Allen. The teams will be strategic in the match-ups between the players.
It’s hard to decide a favourite, not that the teams are bothered about that, they just want to get started. Doc Rivers put it best "They're the (higher) seed, so I don't see them being the underdog, I don't see us being the underdog. And I don't care, honestly.
It's two good teams and let's play."
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