1. Signing David West to a two-year, $20 million deal, a decision that looks brilliant now

2. Trading the draft rights to Kawhi Leonard and two well-regarded international prospects to the Spurs for George Hill, a move that has helped both teams but seems likely to become a long-term San Antonio win

3. Not blowing Indiana’s present or future cap space by overpaying a player who was not worth that sacrifice. Jamal Crawford, for instance, was in deep talks with the Pacers when the league resumed business after the lockout. Crawford eventually signed with Portland and mostly struggled. That discipline allowed Bird to snag Leandro Barbosa for a second-round pick at the trade deadline, and it has Indiana well-positioned to make prudent decisions with key free agents — Hill and Roy Hibbert — this summer.

Wow. When you list all of that, it’s not so surprising Bird got the nod here. Olshey was the consensus preseason choice for nabbing a transformation superstar under unusual circumstances, with the league at the time holding final say-so over the Hornets.

• With a few mini-surprises here and there — some uncharacteristic Spurs’ turnovers, Boris Diaw’s ability to contain Blake Griffin without much help — the Spurs-Clippers opener went about as expected. The Spurs ran their offense, and though the Clippers did well to contain Tony Parker, the Spurs generally kept working and passing and cutting until an open shot emerged. Many of them were three-pointers, of course. Andrew Han of ClipperBlog on the new kind of team the Clips are facing after a seven-game bloodbath against Memphis:

The Clippers were actually reasonable at shutting down the initial offensive action. This is what made their defense so effective in the Memphis series. The problem here is that the Spurs are very adept at moving to the second, third, fourth, fifth and then resetting back to the initial setup. Do you know how Clipper fans have fallen in love with watching Chris Paul probe a defense all season? That probing is basically engrained in the design of the Spurs offense. It stretches and manipulates the Clippers defense until it yields a breakdown.

• The NBA fines Andrew Bynum and Devin Ebanks.

• Sebastian Pruiti of Grantland breaks down the Heat’s final play on Tuesday – the last-chance three-pointer for Mario Chalmers. Two key points of emphasis from Pruiti’s post: 1. What an inbounds pass from Shane Battier!; and 2. Chalmers is the second- or third-best three-point shooter on the team, and the best (Mike Miller) wasn’t on the floor. James Jones, the Heat’s other three-point ace, was on the floor in a role we’d expect Miller to fill, but the play was designed for Chalmers. And as Pruiti notes, Chalmers is a better three-point shooter than Dwyane Wade or LeBron James.

• Rob Mahoney of Bleacher Report on Mo Williams’ defense in Game 1 of the Spurs-Clippers series:

Williams receives plenty of criticism for his defensive deficiencies, but on Tuesday night, he stuck with Green step for step, and prevented him from making a single shot — or even making a single productive dribble, really — while he was on the court. Williams may struggle to fight through pick and rolls or stay with clever ball-handlers, but Green is exactly the kind of semi-dynamic three-point threat that Williams can hope to contain.

• Timothy Varner of the Spurs-themed blog 48 Minutes of Hell grades each Spurs player for their Game 1 performances and has this to say about Parker:

The Spurs’ biggest adjustment in Game 2 is finding a way to shake L.A.’s coverage of Parker. Parker struggled from the field—largely due to the Clippers’ D — but still found ways to get his teammates buckets.

• I’m sort of sick of statistics showing how dominant the Spurs have been over the last 35 games or so, mostly because I’ve brought up so many, but the one Marc Stein unearths here in San Antonio’s recent road record is just incredible.

• Interesting thoughts on how the Lakers might able to contain Russell Westbrook without exhausting Kobe Bryant, who defended Westbrook for most of Game 1 in that series.

• Shocker: Gregg Popovich was unhappy with his team’s defense in Game 1.

• Tom Haberstroh details how the Heat have gradually improved playing without Chris Bosh after a terrible start to last season, and he reveals some interesting numbers about how often LeBron has posted up on offense so far in the playoffs.

• Dwyane Wade complaining about the Pacers’ celebration after their win was obviously ridiculous, given Miami’s recent history, as Michael Wallace of ESPN.com points out here. Wade said this in frustration after a very tough loss, but the Heat’s continued lack of self-awareness when it comes to their July 2010 free-agency championship celebration is astounding.

• I feel like I write this every day, but here goes: The relationship between the Maloof family and the city of Sacramento continues to deteriorate.

• Wayne Winston, stats genius and former consultant for the Mavs, on the rotation choices Chicago and Memphis made in their first-round defeats.

• Searching for offense in Boston.

Here’s the foul in question:

We all knew this was coming, even though Wade’s dangerous shoulder-check was not so different from Jason Smith’s takedown of Blake Griffin during a March game in New Orleans:

The league suspended Smith two games for this. What’s the difference? There are a few, but only some of them should have played any role in the league’s decision to let Wade skate.

The factors that deserve real consideration:

• Griffin had the ball and Collison did not, though he was about to catch an awkward pass from Danny Granger when Wade leveled him. The difference is meaningful only in the sense that it gives Wade the flimsiest of alibis here. It does not appear that Collison expected Granger to pass him the ball, since Granger is open on the left side, while Wade and Collison are in the same general lane on the right side of the floor. As Granger scrambles to pick up the ball and Collison starts his run out, Collison actually veers slightly to the right, as if intending to get in Wade’s way and protect Granger from a possible chase-down block. If taken under the NBA’s interrogation lights, Wade might be able to keep a straight face while arguing that he was simply chasing Granger, and that he did not expect Collison to appear in his path.

Granger had to slow down to pick the ball off the floor, and he likely passed to Collison because he feared he wasn’t moving fast enough to outrun Wade’s attempt at a block. The fear Wade inspires as a fast-break shot-blocker might have contributed to this play looking as bad as it does, since it probably motivated Collison’s slight change in direction and Granger’s decision to pass.

Again, it’s a flimsy alibi, and probably one that would not hold up under oath. Wade was frustrated by a no-call on the other end, and he clearly extends his forearm into Collison’s lower back — a dangerous move. (As an aside, the clip of the Wade foul includes two wonderful little bonuses: the lone Pacers fan wearing a Roy Hibbert jersey standing in protest, and the fact that Granger’s pass ends up conking Wade in the head. Poetic justice, via the basketball gods.)

Smith had no such alibi. Griffin had the ball, and Smith just ran right into him. The NBA doesn’t want Wade out for two playoff games, and Miami would be in dire straights without him. Both need a small out, a tiny difference between the Wade and Smith hits, and the circumstances provide one.

• The playoffs mean more than the regular season.  A playoff game is worth significantly more, and suspensions should probably reflect that reality. The league suspended Rajon Rondo two regular-season games for tossing a ball at an official, but for only one game after Rondo bumped referee Marc Davis in Atlanta during Game 2 of Boston’s first-round series. Multi-game playoff suspensions are very rare, Metta World Peace notwithstanding.

The only possibility here was a one-game suspension, and the league, for whatever reason, decided this foul was not quite worthy of a one-game postseason absence.

• Speaking of World Peace: It clearly does and should matter that Wade did not go at Collison’s head.

And now, things that should not have factored into this decision:

• That Wade is famous, while Smith and Collison are not

• That Griffin is famous, while Smith and Collison are not

• That Collison popped right back up, while Griffin stayed down for a bit

And two tricky factors that may or may not matter here:

• That Griffin is the frequent target of hard fouls, due in part to his poor free throw shooting;

• That Smith egged on the crowd and waived his arms like a WWE villain (or hero?) after the foul, while Wade more or less removed himself from the situation, chewed his gum and maintained that oh-so-cool steely look.

If you argued those two factors should mitigate Wade’s punishment, I would listen. But taken all together, it’s not immediately clear why this foul would not result in a one-game suspension. There are cases to be made either way, but fans, media and the Pacers deserve to hear the case for the NBA’s official decision.

It is slightly inaccurate, though, to suggest that James shied away from the ball for the entirety of crunch time. He took a three-pointer with 3:35 to go and attempted a driving layup — snuffed out brilliantly by the Pacers’ Paul George — with less than 90 seconds remaining. He crashed the offensive glass hard on three of those Wade misses. A player who wishes to hide does not chase offensive rebounds, especially when grabbing them often leads to free throws.

It was a James rebound of a Wade miss with 55 seconds left that led to LeBron’s two missed free throws with Miami trailing 76-75. Those misses — unacceptable at that stage, even given fatigue — came after this play, the first time Wednesday night that chatter bubbled up that James did not want the ball under pressure:

Down by one at money time, the Heat give James the ball up high, set up a pick-and-roll involving Pacers center Roy Hibbert and tell everyone else — including perhaps the second-best player in the league — to kindly move out of the way. LeBron had been doing solid work on the pick-and-roll all night, taking advantage of the slow-footed Hibbert for pull-ups, tear-drops and the occasional blow-by drive. But here, with the 7-foot-2 Hibbert well above his comfort zone, James picks up his dribble north of the foul line and dishes to Shane Battier for a potential corner three-pointer. James makes this pass a half-dozen times per game. He might be the best in the league at this kind of diagonal pass. His dishes are so effective in part because they come a beat earlier than most players throw them — just as this pass comes a beat earlier than you might expect from a crunch-time scorer.

Was it a bad pass? A scared pass? Here’s what the situation looked like when James chose pass over shot:

You can see Pacers power forward David West sagging off Battier on the left edge of the paint and George doing the same on the right side. James could surely have blown past Hibbert, but the lane was going to be tight. On the other hand, the help defense from West and George isn’t dramatic or all that different from anything LeBron sees during the second quarter of a January game.

About 30 seconds later, trailing by two, the Heat called a timeout and ran this weird-looking play:

Let’s be clear: The Heat get a good shot, even if it’s not necessarily the one coach Erik Spoelstra designed this play to produce. The play begins with Wade pitching to James in a sort of high-speed pick-and-roll between the two. That goes nowhere, and James holds the ball still up top. At that point, Wade, lurking around the baseline, makes the decision that with things stalling out up high, he’s going to post up the smaller George Hill. It’s unclear whether this was the original intent, but it’s not a bad option.

Wade’s decision to set up in the post leads to the first of two James passes on this play that appear to be classic “I don’t want the ball” moves. It goes to Battier, and after reviewing the play, it’s obvious why LeBron throws the pass: Battier’s man, West, is denying the entry pass to Wade:

The pass to Battier forces West away from the post. Battier then whips the ball back to James, who holds it in place before Wade flashes above the foul line to take the final pass.

It’s possible for two things to be true here at the same time:

1. The Heat got a very good shot by going to someone other than James.

2. LeBron did not appear prepared to seize this moment, either because he wasn’t willing, or because Spoelstra designed the play for Wade.

Spoelstra drew up Miami’s final play for point guard Mario Chalmers to come off a double screen on the left wing and launch a potential game-tying three-pointer. LeBron served as one of those screeners, and as Indiana’s defense shifted toward Chalmers, James had a chance to pop free behind the three-point line in the left corner for a possible pass from Chalmers. He never did. Maybe he didn’t think there was enough time, or that his defender, George, would close the gap quickly. Maybe he didn’t think Chalmers, a crunch-time gunner, would find him.

Taken together, it’s fair to look at this last minute and wonder about James’ desire to act as a scorer in crunch time. The evidence isn’t as clear-cut as the howling critics would like — remember James crashing the glass, shooting a three and missing a layup in the last 3:30 — but there is a tentativeness to his play in the final 90 seconds, something the Miami coaching staff might be feeding a bit with its play-calling.

That said, the Heat lost for two reasons that will dog them throughout this series against a surly Pacers team:

1. Their supporting cast contributed nothing. It’s important to remember in evaluating James’ overall performance that Miami would not have been in this game without him. James was the best player on both ends of the floor, working his tail off to score against Indiana’s strong defense, fronting West and keying an active defense that was simply too fast for the Pacers. He and Wade combined to shoot 18-of-44 (40.9 percent); the rest of the Heat hit 9-of-34 (26.5 percent).

2. The Heat’s offense has regressed badly in the last four quarters without power forward Chris Bosh, who is out indefinitely after straining an abdominal muscle in the second quarter of Game 1. Some of this is directly linked to Bosh’s absence, and not only because his jump shooting opens the floor. Some of Miami’s most creative motion-based sets, involving all three stars working off each other, just don’t function without Bosh.

For instance: Remember those cross screens under the hoop that tore apart the Knicks in the first round? The plays in which Bosh would screen for Wade or James under the basket, hoping to spring one of them in the post, as another Heat player held the ball up top? Those plays don’t work with Joel Anthony setting the pick. Every time the Heat ran this action on Tuesday, Hibbert simply abandoned Anthony ahead of the pick to bump a Miami star off his path and force the post-up well outside the paint:

But Miami’s failure on offense goes beyond the loss of Bosh. This team remains uncommitted to running its best sets until Spoelstra can call a timeout, organize his players and order them to run a play. The Heat didn’t lose this game in the last minute. They lost it because they settled for difficult shots from James and Wade, many of them taken via isolations and while the other star stood in the corner, a glorified James Jones. Indiana’s defense is too good for Miami to play like this, and Spoelstra knows it. Over and over, the Heat would settle for back-to-back-to-back low-percentage shots out of stagnant play, leading Spoelstra to stop the action and send them out with something better. That would last one or two possessions, and Miami would regress again to “your turn, my turn.”

Take this sequence of three consecutive possessions from late in the second quarter, beginning with Wade taking a terrible jumper as James stands on the right wing:

Next up? A high pick-and-roll for James as Wade stands in the right corner:

This isn’t a bad shot, really. James might be the best pick-and-roll player in the league. But Indiana’s defense is long and active, and it can deal with simplicity. More to the point: The whole idea of signing three stars was to minimize tough shots out of predictable plays, and Miami can do better, even without one of those stars.

How do we know that? Because Spoelstra called a 20-second timeout after the Pacers’ next possession, and Miami came out with the deadly James/Wade pick-and-roll:

It doesn’t work, mostly because Hibbert pays no attention to Anthony and plugs the lane on James. But it gets Indiana’s defense scrambling and at least has the potential to produce a decent look.

Miami went through almost this exact sequence from about 4:30 to 3:10 of the fourth quarter: Wade made a step-back isolation jumper over West; LeBron missed an off-the-dribble three-pointer out of a pick-and-roll; and the Heat called timeout and came back with a James/Wade pick-and-roll that earned Wade two free throws.

This has been an issue with Miami for two years. Every team tends to look better on offense coming out of timeouts, but the gap in quality between Miami’s out-of-timeout offense and the rest of its stuff is significant. The Heat need to be better when Spoelstra and the coaching staff aren’t there to baby-sit every play.

Bosh takes them to another level, but he’s gone for a while. The Heat will have to do it with the players on hand. Game 3 is on Thursday.

• The players’ union wants Bird Rights for a particular class of free agents, and they are taking their case to an arbitrator, according to Howard Beck of The New York Times. As Beck notes, this has major implications for the Knicks this summer.

• Matt Moore of CBS Sports with his take on how the Spurs will deal with Blake Griffin.

• Some ideas for how the Pacers might be able to get the ball more often to Roy Hibbert on the block.

• Neil Paine uses some fancy math to simulate how the Heat’s odds of winning the title change without Chris Bosh.

• O.J. Mayo, a restricted free agent this summer, wants to be a point guard.

• Timothy Varner of the Spurs-themed blog 48 Minutes of Hell predicts Danny Green, and not Tony Parker, will get the lion’s share of the Chris Paul defensive assignment. This is what happens when Randy Foye is your starting two-guard.

• Dwyane Wade says he has happily taken a back seat to LeBron James this season, in terms of who controls the ball most often. I would love to see a sophisticated statistical analysis that proves this true — one that includes things like the amount of time each player holds the ball when both are on the floor, the number of dribbles each takes, etc. Wade has actually attempted more field-goal per minute (but fewer foul shots) this season than he did last season, and his usage rate — a measure of the percentage of Miami possessions he uses via a shot, drawn foul or turnover — is identical to what it was last season, per Basketball-Reference. James’ usage rate is also almost exactly what it was last season.

• Sebastian Pruiti of Grantland looks at how Miami defended David West on the pick-and-roll.

• Jared Wade of the Pacers-themed blog Eight Points, Nine Seconds on how Bosh’s injury might change things from Indiana’s side–including possible tweaks to Frank Vogel’s rotation.

• Jordan Kahn, writing at Hickory High, with video analysis of some of the key plays down the stretch of Boston-Philly on Monday night.

• The relationship between the Maloof family and the city of Sacramento continues to deteriorate.

• Boston fans discuss the controversial moving screen call on Kevin Garnett.

• Paul Flannery of WEEI.com writes that Boston lost that game for reasons well beyond a single referee’s call.

• Also from Flannery: Doc Rivers explains why Boston fouled intentionally while down by just a point in the last 30 seconds of that game.

• Elton Brand thinks Paul Pierce is struggling with his sprained MCL.

• Will the Suns make a run at Eric Gordon, a restricted free agent?

• Darius Soriano on Ramon Sessions’ continuing funk:

As for Sessions, he still hasn’t been able to escape the funk he’s been in. He’s being asked to run a slow down offensive game to the benefit of his teammates but in the process his own production is suffering. Sure, he was able to attack off the dribble a handful of times but it’s obvious his rhythm is non-existent. He only hit one of his seven attempts from the floor, didn’t go to the foul line, and was mostly a spectator.

• More on Sessions’ struggles here.

Spurs coach Gregg Popovich probably won’t make Tim Duncan defend Blake Griffin full-time. (D. Clarke Evans/NBAE via Getty Images)

We’ve already got a bang-up preview of the Spurs-Clippers series that begins tonight, and I’ve already given my quick-hitting prediction: Spurs in five. That prediction is based on the idea that the Clippers’ defense, merely average in the regular season, won’t be able to limit the Spurs’ league-best offense enough to win four times in seven tries. The Spurs lit up the Clippers in three regular-season games, scoring nearly 113 points per 100 possessions — about 4.5 points better than San Antonio’s overall mark — and shooting 44 percent from three-point range on nearly 25 attempts per game.

The Clippers struggled to defend the three all season, and their big men are shaky against the pick-and-roll — a deadly combination of flaws against a San Antonio team that, unlike the Grizzlies, does not offer a poor shooter or two off of which the Clippers can help.

That said, the Spurs’ status as big favorites here come with a few caveats:

• The Clippers scored 107.2 points per 100 possessions against the Spurs, a mark that would have nearly led the league, and they would have taken two of three meetings with San Antonio if not for a semi-miraculous Gary Neal game-tying three-pointer. The Spurs, surprisingly, ranked as one of the league’s worst teams at defending the pick-and-roll, per Synergy Sports. They ranked dead last in points allowed per possession on pick-and-rolls in which the ball-handler finished the play, and the Clippers have a pretty decent point guard–provided Chris Paul’s groin allows him to be something close to the usual Chris Paul. For the season, about 15.9 percent of San Antonio possessions ended via a pick-and-roll ball-handler finishing the play, the largest figure for any playoff team, per Synergy.

That probably says at least a little bit about how the Spurs prioritize defending various shot types over others, but it also suggests Paul could feast on open mid-range shots and driving lanes.

• The Clippers’ defense improved as the season went on and played well against the Grizzlies in the first round. That is partly due to a few bench players (Reggie Evans, Kenyon Martin, Eric Bledsoe) combining for more minutes, but Blake Griffin’s rotations were also a bit zippier during some of the higher-leverage moments of the Memphis series.

• The Clippers’ other huge defensive weakness — a tendency to foul everything in sight — is not something the Spurs are especially good at exploiting. San Antonio ranked a bit below average in earning free throws, though we might see Evans knock Tony Parker beyond mid-court with a hip-check on a pick-and-roll at some point in this series.

• The Clippers have Griffin, and the Spurs only have two top-shelf post defenders — Tim Duncan and Tiago Splitter — Gregg Popovich rarely plays at the same time. And that raises the most interesting question of this series, even if Griffin is also ailing due to a knee injury: Who guards Griffin?

And that in turn raises perhaps the most interesting question about these Spurs: As they advance deeper into the playoffs and face better competition, how much more will Popovich play his three stars — and how much more can they give?

To wit: I watched all 51 shots Griffin took against San Antonio this season, and whittled that down to 43 shots he took within the Clippers’ half-court offense. Duncan was the primary defender on just eight of those 43 attempts, with the bulk of anti-Griffin duty going to DeJuan Blair (18 shots against) and Matt Bonner (10). Both would appear overmatched against Griffin on the block, and Memphis famously bludgeoned the Spurs’ power forwards in last season’s playoffs. Popovich during the season gambled that he could keep Duncan mostly on the less threatening Clippers’ big men, including Jordan, while his power forwards at least contained Griffin with help from San Antonio’s guards and wings. Griffin averaged 22 points on 53 percent shooting against the Spurs.

Popovich will make that gamble again for large portions of this series; Duncan is not going to be Griffin’s full-time primary defender, especially with the stout Boris Diaw now working as the Spurs’ starting power forward. Diaw isn’t exactly an ace on defense, and quick post players — i.e., Griffin — can certainly give him issues with face-up moves and baseline spins. But he’s better equipped to defend Griffin than Blair, who allowed 50 percent shooting on post-up plays, is always reaching and lunging out of position and has fallen to the No. 5 spot in San Antonio’s big-man rotation.

The Spurs’ guards and small forwards are also very smart helpers. This year’s crop, with Kawhi Leonard and Danny Green, is longer and more capable of mucking up passing lanes. The Spurs will help from unpredictable places at unpredictable times, and they’ll use fake stunts to confuse both Griffin and the players trying to enter the ball to him. And when Duncan is assigned to a shaky offensive player, as he will be for much of this series, he becomes an even better help defender; he will shift Griffin’s way before Griffin even begins a post move.

The Spurs actually ranked 12th overall in points allowed per possession on post-up plays, and Bonner’s direct matchups shot a borderline unthinkable 29 percent against him on the block, per Synergy. San Antonio, for all the real limitations it has at power forward on defense, has clearly done something right this season in the post — and that “something right” hasn’t involved simply burdening Duncan with every opponent’s No. 1 option.

The interesting thing to watch is if Popovich tilts that balance a little — if Duncan takes Griffin half the time in this series instead of just 20 percent of the time. Ditto for the minutes Duncan and Ginobili play. A banged-up Ginobili averaged 34.8 minutes per game in the playoffs last season after logging just 30.3 per game in the regular season. Duncan’s minutes jumped, but only by about two per game — from 28 in the regular season to 30 per game in the Spurs’ loss to Memphis.

The Spurs’ bench this season has been tremendous, and it’s deeper now than ever. But if they find themselves up against a Thunder team playing Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook and James Harden 40 minutes apiece, how much wiggle room does Popovich have?

We may begin to find out a little in this series — if Griffin and the Clippers can force the issue.

Paul Pierce has produced very little, the Celtics rare get to the line and they often turn over the ball. (AP)

All sorts of crazy things happened in the last five minutes or so of Philadelphia’s huge Game 2 win in Boston on Monday, and I’ll get to them in a second. But first let me say this: I am astonished on a daily basis by how many fans, both in Boston and elsewhere, think the Celtics are a good offensive team, and are thus surprised they have struggled to score against the Hawks and the Sixers. The misunderstanding seems to come from the fact that a) Boston has very famous players on its team; and b) the Celtics rank fifth overall in field-goal percentage and eighth in three-point percentage.

So let me put this as clearly as I can: The Celtics are a bad offensive team. They were so-so last season and in 2009-10, and have been in continuing decline on offense for three seasons now. It’s wonderful that they shoot with great accuracy, especially from three-point range, but accurate shooting does not alone make a team good at scoring points. Field-goal percentage is no way to judge offense. It does not account for how many shots a team generates, how often it gets to the foul line and what sorts of shots it attempts. And in news that broke three years ago, this is where Boston fails.

The Celtics get to the foul line at a below-average rate, meaning they don’t generate many of the game’s easiest points. Only six teams attempted fewer three-pointers than Boston, rendering the Celtics’ very nice accuracy from that range not-so-meaningful. No team in NBA history has ever rebounded fewer of its own misses, which is a fancy way of saying Boston — mostly by choice — gets almost no second-chance points via offensive rebounds.

And for the fifth straight season, the Celtics have been among the league’s worst teams at turning over the ball. The result: Boston ranked 25th in points per possession, in a virtual tie with the Wizards. Toss in some serious health issues, and no one should be surprised Boston is playing low-scoring slugfests against a Philly defense that was neck-and-neck all season with Boston and Chicago atop the points-allowed-per-possession rankings.

All of this reached a scary point on Monday, when Boston’s offense late in the game amounted in large part to throwing the ball to Kevin Garnett in the post and praying. Garnett shot 4-of-6 in the fourth quarter before a meaningless buzzer-beater, but he also turned the ball over three times and had trouble generating looks in the post against Lavoy Allen’s staunch defense. Meanwhile, Paul Pierce, clearly hobbled, produced very little, and Rajon Rondo had one of those games where you’re wondering where he is down the stretch.

Evan Turner played off of Rondo to deny entry passes and contain action elsewhere, and while he occasionally made Turner pay — and ran a couple of nice, creative pick-and-rolls with Garnett — the Rondo equation tilted the wrong way for Boston. This included Rondo passing up a wide-open layup early in the first quarter to get Brandon Bass a contested mid-range jumper, and while Bass made the shot, Rondo’s habit of refusing to shoot in the lane has gotten even more ridiculous during these playoffs.

Now, to the finish:

• The 29 other teams are probably rejoicing at the illegal screen called on Garnett during Boston’s final meaningful offensive possession. Garnett has been setting illegal picks in the NBA for 17 years, and his screen on Andre Iguodala was obviously against the rules. It’s problematic in the big picture for the officials to whistle this kind of thing in any moment, big or small, when they let so much other pushing, shoving and illegal screening go. The inconsistency with which the league officiates illegal screening and contact between big men and guards on the perimeter is maddening, and Boston fans are right to ask: Why now?

But in-game consistency is something else, and Garnett admitted after the game the officials had warned him about moving picks. Just as important: They whistled him at the 7:45 mark for one of those shoves I’ve been harping about the past few weeks:

As you can see, Garnett clearly shoves Spencer Hawes with both hands. His intent is to blow up the Hawes/Lou Williams pick-and-roll by shoving Hawes toward Williams, which has the dual effect of giving Williams’ man (Avery Bradley) an open lane to go under the pick and nearly causing a collision between Williams and Hawes. This was a correct call, though one that officials this postseason have not made against the Clippers’ Reggie Evans and Greg Stiemsma (Garnett’s teammate) on identical shoves.

Again, consistency is a real problem, but the officials within this game had sent the Celtics a message that Garnett on this night would have to clean up his physical play. He didn’t, and the call happened when Boston had a chance to tie the game. The call contributed to a Boston loss, just as a blown call on a Marquis Daniels foul during a last-second inbounds play in Game 6 against Atlanta contributed to Boston advancing into the second round.

That call did not decide the Boston-Atlanta series, just as the Garnett call did not decide Monday’s game. It was one of dozens of little things all over the court that made the final point totals what they were, and in a larger sense, the series is tied because two bad offenses reliant on motion and mid-range jumpers are facing two elite defenses.

• The more interesting decision to me was Doc Rivers’ move to intentionally  foul the Sixers at the end of the game. To review:

The Sixers rebounded a Ray Allen miss with 28.5 seconds left, a one-point lead and a full 24-second shot clock. The Sixers also had a foul to give for Boston’s next possession. My bet is that most fans thought in the moment that Boston would go for the stop and hope to get the ball back down by one point with something like four seconds left. But that’s not a can’t-miss scenario, even in the event the Sixers missed and the Celtics collected the rebound cleanly.

Philadelphia could in theory have milked more than the full 24-second clock by shooting just before it expired, a scenario in which Boston might not have been able to rebound and call timeout until there were only three or 3.5 seconds left — perhaps even fewer, given a bad bounce or a deflection. Philadelphia could have then disrupted Boston’s first out-of-bounds play by using its foul to give,  a risky move that could have trimmed another half-second off the clock.

Considering all of this, I was fairly confident Rivers made the right mathematical call to foul on purpose, only the Celtics executed it poorly by waiting until there were 14.4 seconds left for Rondo to foul Jrue Holiday. That was actually Boston’s foul to give, meaning it had to foul Philadelphia again — with 12 seconds left — to stop the clock. If you watch the replay before that first Rondo foul, you’ll see Rivers consult with assistant Armond Hill, turn the court, watch the action for a few seconds and then finally order Rondo to foul.

That delay struck me as weird. If you’re going to foul and extend the game, then extend it as long as possible, right? That’s especially so if you’re not using clock to press for a steal, and Boston certainly wasn’t doing that.

I checked with several stats-oriented folks around the league, and the early (and very slight) consensus was that Rivers made the right decision to foul on purpose, but that Boston should have done so immediately. The larger consensus, though, was that Rivers was caught in a very difficult clock-management decision, and that even the “right” answer is not so obviously right as to render playing for the stop a clearly incorrect choice. This is especially true given the difficulty of making decisions to foul on the fly and then having players, awaiting instructions during high-pressure moments, execute those decisions correctly.

As Kevin Pelton wrote at Basketball Prospectus last week, the intense focus on late-game decisions during the playoffs is almost unfair to coaches, in that much of it underestimates the difficulty of those decisions and results in the pigeon-holing of coaches as “good” or “bad” late in games. Rivers has long been hailed as a late-game genius for his play-calling, but Monday night went badly for him, and the end of Game 6 against Atlanta was nearly a disaster, with Daniels fouling too soon and then bizarrely defending Al Horford on a lob play that could have tied the game.

The lesson: Coaching in the NBA is really, really hard.

For the second straight postseason, a Lakers opponent armed with an elite mid-range shooter — the Thunder this season, the Hornets last season — designed much of its offense around the idea that it could produce relatively easy mid-range shots by attacking Bynum on various pick plays. The Thunder were confident that Bynum would hang back rather than step out to challenge Russell Westbrook and Kevin Durant, and that both players — especially Durant — could get clean looks from 15 feet.

The mid-range shot is the worst shot in basketball, a low-percentage attempt that produces few free throws or offensive rebounds. Most teams that shoot a lot of them are bad offensive teams. But it’s a shot every team must have in its arsenal, especially against an opponent like the Lakers, who have two elite wing defenders and two 7-footers capable of blocking everything at the rim.

The Thunder are one of the few teams with the personnel to exploit this mid-range weakness in an efficient way. They have one deadly shooter (Durant), another star fast becoming deadly from that range (Westbrook) and a center — Bynum’s opposite number — who can serve as the final screener on lots of different play types. This stuff destroyed the Lakers their 119-90 loss in Game 1 on Monday. It resulted in some communication breakdowns and a few mid-stream strategy changes in the second half — the kind of defensive chaos that hurt the Lakers against Chris Paul and the Hornets last season and ultimately undid them amid a hail of wide-open shots against Dallas in the second round.

The attack began right away, and, notably, it did not begin with a pick-and-roll:

This is classic Thunder, with Durant running around a thicket of screens, the last of which center Kendrick Perkins sets with a little nudge into the chest of Metta World Peace. Right away, we see Bynum’s de facto strategy is to hang back:

That’s not a bad strategy on its own or even against most teams; there aren’t many near-7-footers who can hurt you in just about every way possible on this kind of play. And Bynum doesn’t miss blocking this dunk by all that much. But the strategy puts an enormous amount of stress on World Peace to somehow prevent Durant from turning the corner, with the alternative (and also unappealing) possibility of Kobe Bryant crashing off Westbrook on the left wing to attack Durant. Perhaps the Lakers will have Kobe or point guard Ramon Sessions do more of this in Game 2.

Here’s a variation on the same theme from later in the first quarter, with Durant curling off a Perkins pick on the left side:

Bynum comes out more — he’s working hard, not loafing — but Durant is still able to catch the ball just inside the foul line and get a fairly clean look. Ideally, a defense would like to make Durant catch the ball a few feet deeper.

The Thunder also attacked Bynum in this way on regular pick-and-roll plays. Here’s one from the second quarter in which Durant is able to get well below the foul line before meeting any opposition from Bynum:

And here’s a pull-up from the third:

Again, you can see Bynum is working hard here, but that he also appears uncomfortable. He chases Perkins out pretty aggressively as Perkins prepares to set his pick, abruptly stops at the foul line and begins backpedaling against Durant’s drive. Bynum’s feet are moving like mad, but he’s not getting a lot of effective work done; the backpedaling prevents him from getting his full momentum into his challenge of Durant’s shot.

Here’s another pick-and-roll from the second quarter in which Bynum makes an honest effort to strike some balance between sagging back and jumping out on Durant:

As you can see, Bynum comes out well above the foul line to contain Durant:

But Bynum is clearly out of his element. He bites on a mean left-shoulder juke from Durant, and Bynum just doesn’t have the speed or agility to recover from that kind of setback against a scorer as quick as Durant.

Nothing was working for Bynum or the Lakers, and so in the second half, they tried having Bynum hedge aggressively on the pick-and-roll as if he were Kevin Garnett or Chris Bosh (or Howard). It didn’t quite work:

Bynum actually does pretty well here to prevent Durant from turning the corner completely on Sessions. But sending Bynum that far outside forces his big-man partner, Pau Gasol, to defend both Thunder bigs as Bynum’s man (Nazr Mohammed) rolls to the rim. It takes the Thunder two quick-hitting passes to exploit the gap — not an easy thing to pull off — but they do it.

The Lakers also experimented with a zone, a rarity for them, and there will be games when Westbrook and even Durant miss more of these mid-range looks. That’s the thing about long jumpers, even relatively open ones: Sometimes they don’t go in.

That’s why it’s important to understand that this problem does not mean Bynum is a bad defensive player. If your biggest issue is a vulnerability to mid-range jumpers against star mid-range shooters, that’s about the least-harmful flaw you can have. Bynum is a beast of a post defender when he’s engaged, he changes piles of shots at the rim and he’s one of the best defensive rebounders in the league. The Lakers gave up about 2.5 fewer points per 100 possessions when Bynum was on the floor during the regular season, per NBA.com. And Bynum can make up for his down days on defense by scorching opponents in the post when the Lakers have the ball; he looked pretty darn powerful early in Game 1 against the Thunder on the block.

But he has weaknesses on defense, and unfortunately for the Lakers, they have run into two teams well positioned to attack those weaknesses. The Nuggets used Kenneth Faried, JaVale McGee and Al Harrington to run Bynum to death in transition during the first round, and though Bynum’s effort in getting back was blatantly lacking at times, he was also at a speed disadvantage that no amount of effort was going to overcome. In this round, with the Lakers working as big underdogs to begin with, the Thunder have gone at him the same way Paul did in raining mid-range jumpers on Los Angeles in last year’s first round.

The net result: In eight playoff games, the Lakers have allowed 109 points per 100 possessions with Bynum on the floor and 98.9 when he has been on the bench, per NBA.com. That’s roughly the difference between the league’s fifth- or sixth-ranked defense and one that would have ranked last in the regular season.

That gap is not all on Bynum, obviously. The Lakers’ point guards have been mostly awful on defense, and World Peace, a fierce defender who shares lots of minutes with Bynum, missed the Lakers’ first six playoff games because of a suspension. Bynum also doesn’t get quite as much time as Gasol against backups because the Lakers typically turn to Gasol to play the early minutes of the second and fourth quarters, when opponents often have a few starters resting. I’m not sure how dramatically that plays into Bynum’s horrid on-court/off-court numbers in the playoffs, though, since Denver’s backups often outplayed the starters.

Bynum isn’t going to change between Game 1 and Game 2 of this series, and you can expect the Thunder to milk this kind of action until the Lakers find a way to contain it. What does Mike Brown have in the bag?

Phil Jackson’s options may be limited if he’s interested in returning to the bench. (John W. McDonough/SI)

• Ken Berger of CBS Sports reports that no team has called Phil Jackson about a head-coaching position, though it should be noted only a few jobs are potentially open, and that most of them — Washington, Charlotte, Portland — aren’t exactly the type that would lure Jackson.

Berger’s piece has some great details about Jackson’s physical health, his goals in that regard for the next few months, the internal workings of the Knicks organization and whether Jackson wants to coach.

• John Hollinger previews the Thunder-Lakers series for ESPN.com, and Britt Robson does the same for SI.com. Both take the Thunder, with Robson going with Oklahoma City in five games. That’s my official prediction as well, and this feels like one of those series that will be more interesting in the build-up than it is on the court. I’ll leave the previewing to Hollinger and Robson, but here, to me, are the three most interesting questions of the series:

1. How much does Thabo Sefolosha play? He is by far the Thunder’s best option for defending Kobe Bryant, but he’s a minus on offense, and his presence on the court means that, with some rare exceptions that may not apply against the Lakers (see the next question), the Thunder don’t have their three best players on the floor together. James Harden has looked OK against Bryant in short stretches, but he’s at a size disadvantage, and he’s just not a polished defender on or off the ball — the latter an increasingly important part of defending Kobe.

2. Do the Thunder have the guts to go small, with Kevin Durant at power forward, when both Pau Gasol and Andrew Bynum are on the floor? They did this briefly in the Thunder’s second blowout win over the Lakers this season, which surprised me at the time. The Thunder are dynamite when they go small, but Scott Brooks might have to be opportunistic about it in this series. The Lakers typically have the less-threatening Jordan Hill on the floor across the end of the first/third quarters and the beginning of the second/fourth, and it will be interesting to see if the Thunder limit small-ball to those stretches.

3. Who does Kobe Bryant guard, and when? The easy answer is that he’ll rest on Sefolosha when possible and slide to Harden when the Thunder pair their two best guards. But Russell Westbrook has hurt the Lakers in the past, and it will be tough to watch Kobe waste big chunks of time on a non-scorer such as Sefolosha if Westbrook is running wild on Ramon Sessions. Then again, the Lakers need to conserve Bryant’s energy for offense. This will be another area where a coach must find the right balance.

• Darius Soriano of the Lakers-themed blog Forum Blue & Gold gives his thoughts on which player Kobe should guard in his typically outstanding preview of the series.

• Everything you need to know about the Spurs-Clippers series. My official prediction: Spurs in 5.

• D.J. Foster of ClipperBlog reflects on the totally ridiculous scenario in which a collection of bench players, including two big men who weren’t on the roster as of Dec. 20, led the Clippers to a defense-first road win in Game 7 against Memphis:

Really, it all couldn’t have culminated in a crazier, more fitting way. Reggie Evans was legitimately the fourth best frontcourt player in this series. Often times he was the best. Step back and think about that for a second, and let it sink in how ridiculously wonderful it all is.

Had the officials followed the rule book to the letter, Evans probably would have fouled out of all seven games in short order. But they didn’t, and that’s not Evans’ fault. Evans is a smart player, and he played as physically as the officials allowed, fronting Memphis’ post players, pushing them off the block and wiping them out for offensive rebounds off free throws. And more than that: His all-around defense, on the pick-and-roll and otherwise, was mostly sound, something you’ve rarely been able to say about Evans in the last few years. A series-changing effort.

• Vinny Del Negro, perpetually on the hot seat, generally held up in that series as Lionel Hollins flailed away in the fourth quarter, swapping big men like mad and dusting off Gilbert Arenas for minutes too important for his presence. In Hollins’ defense, health and fatigue drove a lot of the strange big man substitutions he made in Game 7. Zach Randolph was never his 2010-11 self, and he was absolutely gassed in the fourth quarter, once weakly grabbing at Nick Young’s jersey in an attempt to stop Young from running out in transition.

In any case, a series win counts as something of a redemption for Del Negro, who opened up to Yahoo! Sports’ Adrian Wojnarowski in this piece. In fact, he opened up so much you almost wanted him to stop, especially when he began listing his powerful coaching friends:

He started to scroll the messages, and there was a congratulatory text from Dallas Mavericks coach Rick Carlisle. “Rick always calls me … and Doc [Rivers] … And Pop … “

He thinks for a moment. “And Mike Fratello, he calls.”

• Tom Haberstroh of ESPN.com gives his take on the Chris Bosh injury.

• Mike Prada of SB Nation with more smart words on Bosh’s importance.

• Couper Moorhead of HEAT.com uses video to show the benefits of playing LeBron James at power forward – and of Joel Anthony’s screening ability.

• Chris Forsberg of ESPN Boston points out that Avery Bradley made a couple of monster defensive plays late in Boston’s Game 1 win over Philadelphia, including the snuffing of a Lou Williams layup, which led directly to Kevin Garnett’s huge And-1. Also: Williams’ attempt at a step-back corner three-pointer early in the shot clock with about 1:30 left in that game is in the conversation for Worst Shot Of The Playoffs.

• Paul Flannery of WEEI.com on Kevin Garnett, playing incredible ball on both ends of the floor right now. Reminder: This is Garnett’s 17th NBA season. Seventeen!

• Flip Saunders, hanging around the Boston coaching staff for much of the post-season, talks to Steve Bulpett of the Boston Herald about why Garnett is playing so well. Saunders coached Garnett in Minnesota and offers up this gem about Garnett’s famous refusal to acknowledge his actual height:

“We used to say that he was 6-13,” Saunders said with a laugh. “He never wanted to be a 7-footer because he never wanted to be a center. He thought he would be labeled as a center, and he didn’t want that. But he’s at least 7-1. Ryan Hollins is a pretty big guy (listed at 7-feet even), and when they stand there together and KG stands up straight, he’s an inch and a half taller than Ryan.”

• John Schuhmann of NBA.com reminds us the Sixers, too, are banged up. The bit in here about Thaddeus Young is especially important. The Celtics went super small, with Paul Pierce at power forward, for part of the second quarter and the entire fourth quarter, and Young, given a size advantage, did nothing to make Boston pay. Young is a good post up player, with a lefty hook that is especially effective. The lack of production in Game 1, in which Young went 1-of-4, suggests the shin and ankle injuries he suffered in the first half were bothersome. Philadelphia needs him, because Boston will happily go small if it can, given the Celtics’ own thin big man rotation.

• How should the Raptors approach the draft?

• Why it’s not so easy to just throw the ball in the post anymore.

• The state of media coverage of LeBron James.

• Useful updates on the Hornets ownership and arena situations.

• What in the world do we make of Luke Babbitt’s late-season barrage in Portland?

• Sounds like there is mutual interest between Ty Lawson and the Nuggets, in terms of a long extension at some point. The situation is less clear with Andre Miller, a free agent this summer.

Now, LeBron James will play huge minutes at power forward in “smaller” lineups that have done quite well this season, with and without Bosh. Counting only lineups that logged at least 10 minutes together in the regular season, the Heat used James at power forward for 376 minutes and outscored opponents by about 14.5 points per 100 possessions — a number that would have led the league by a long shot, according to Basketball Value. The two such units that recorded the most minutes did not feature Bosh, as the Heat often used James as power forward when one or both of the other stars rested.

David West was unable to punish James in the post in Game 1, both because Miami makes it a chore just to enter the ball, and because LeBron is just as big and strong as the Pacers’ power forward. Miami’s move to sign Shane Battier and retain Mike Miller has it stocked with defenders capable of guarding small forward Danny Granger, sparing each of the LeBron/Battier/Miller trio the full-game burden. The Pacers were unwilling to go small/fast along with Miami on Sunday, forcing West into an awkward matchup on defense with Battier. That pulls West from the paint, opening driving lanes, and over the course of the series it will provide Battier some good looks as West scrambles around in an unfamiliar, perimeter-oriented assignment.

In five meetings this season, the Heat are plus-35 against the Pacers in about 41 minutes with James at power forward, per NBA.com. The sample size is tiny, but we have no evidence Indiana can combat this.

But there are caveats, in both the short- and long-term:

• Caveat No. 1: Miami is obviously better off with all three of its stars. Whenever one of them is hurt, the talk-radio blathering inevitably focuses on the “issue” of whether Miami might improve without that injured player. This is always nonsense and shows no understanding of the difference between individual numbers and team numbers. The Heat outscored their opponents by about seven points per 100 possessions this season, third best in the league, per NBA.com. With all three of their stars on the floor, they were plus-12 per 100 possessions, a huge jump mostly linked to an increase in scoring.

So while James might put up monster individual numbers when Bosh or Dwyane Wade is out, the team — the only thing that matters here — is a different animal when all of its best players can play together. Imagine that! (As an aside, Tom Haberstroh of ESPN.com noted that the Heat were even better — about plus-17 per 100 possessions — when the Wade/James duo played without Bosh, but also that most of those lineups feasted on opposing backups in a small sample size.)

Bosh was poised to play an especially important role in this series against the 7-foot-2 Roy Hibbert on both ends of the court. He obviously can’t match the Indiana center’s height, but he fought hard on the block as Hibbert’s primary defender, forcing Hibbert into a couple of shots that came a foot or two further from the rim than he’d like. Bosh also fronted Hibbert often. He has the quickness to do that and then spin quickly around to Hibbert’s back if an Indiana guard tries to drive right at the fronted Hibbert and sneak by on the baseline — a classic anti-fronting strategy, one at which Leandro Barbosa is especially good.

The bigger Bosh dividends should have come on offense because he can drag Hibbert out of the paint and generally get the big man moving around. Miami was actually establishing a nice rhythm doing this just before Bosh’s injury, with Bosh scoring 13 points on 6-of-11 shooting in 16 minutes. Check out this play from the second quarter, focusing on the Bosh/Wade action in the paint.

The Heat are deadly at running these kind of cross screens under the hoop, but this one is unusual in that Bosh, a power forward, starts way in the corner and is the one taking the screen (from Wade) rather than setting it. The goal is to take advantage of Bosh’s speed edge and spring him in the paint. Wade’s defender, George Hill, understands this and helps way off Wade in order to try to bump Bosh. Look at the situation when Bosh catches and turns:

This is trouble for Indiana, thanks to Bosh’s speed and smart play design. The possession ends in a miss, but the Heat know they are on to something here.

And here’s a similar cross-screen play that again forces Hibbert to rove, resulting in an easy Bosh jumper:

The Heat lose a lot of this creativity when Bosh is gone. No other Miami big man comes close to duplicating his skills, especially because Udonis Haslem has completely lost his jump shot. The Heat reverted a bit to the “your turn, my turn” offense in the second half of Game 1, with Wade and James running variations of the high pick-and-roll (or side pick-and-roll) while the other stood around. That was good enough to win a close game in which Miami’s defense was outstanding. But the Heat are vulnerable when predictable, and the Pacers will watch the tape of Game 1 and realize that without Bosh, they can load up more on James and Wade. Even so, that’s tough to do when the Heat station Wade and two good outside shooters around a James pick-and-roll.

That brings us to caveat No. 2:

• The Pacers are very good, and they understand how to attack Miami. As I noted last week, their offense improved dramatically as the season went on, matching the level of their solid defense and giving the team the tools to push Miami. We’ll get to this more later in the week, but the Pacers generally had the right idea on both ends of the floor Sunday; they just didn’t quite have the precision, speed or shooting accuracy to execute it. Will that change as the series continues?

• The third caveat is the simplest: Miami will be playing a dangerous game if coach Erik Spoelstra asks James to approach 45 minutes every game, a possibility if LeBron must play power forward for extended time. James played at least 42 minutes in 15 of Miami’s 21 postseason games last year, and in the Finals, the Mavericks were convinced that they could exhaust him in a long series. This is one reason Dallas began running a bunch of staggered pick-and-roll plays for guard Jason Terry once it became clear that James would defend him down the stretch of games. Dallas wanted James to expend maximum energy on defense, confident the minutes load would eventually take its toll on body and mind.

Miami has made one adjustment in the postseason that could mitigate this: The Heat have played much more with small lineups that don’t include James at all. Going “small” was almost exclusively a LeBron thing in the regular season; no lineup that featured another Miami guard or wing player as the nominal power forward logged even eight minutes all year, per Basketball Value.

One such lineup — Wade, Miller, Battier, point guard Mario Chalmers and center Joel Anthony — has already been used 22 minutes in the playoffs, and a second has played seven minutes, according to NBA.com’s stats database. Much of this shift had to do with Miami’s first-round matchup against a Knicks team that played small off the bench, lost Amar’e Stoudemire for Game 3 and had a limited Tyson Chandler in Game 1. The Heat played this kind of small lineup for 3:59 of the second quarter in Game 1 against Indiana, and it probably wasn’t a coincidence that this stretch came when foul trouble forced Pacers coach Frank Vogel to play his two backup big men, Tyler Hansbrough and Lou Amundson, at the same time. Indiana was plus-3 in those minutes. It will be interesting to see if Spoelstra has the confidence to use these groups if Hibbert or West is on the court.

Bottom line: Miami is still the favorite here, but things get trickier.

Carlos Boozer did not sound smart after he tanked in Game 6 against the Sixers. (Gary Dineen/NBAE via Getty Images)

• Nick Friedell of ESPN Chicago dissects another Carlos Boozer postseason disappointment and reports Boozer said this following Chicago’s loss Thursday in Philadelphia:

“I thought I played well, especially with the kind of season it was,” Boozer said, when asked to assess his second season in Chicago. “We had the best record again in basketball, won our division again, had the top seed again, that’s all that matters, yo.”

This quote is so off the wall, so ridiculous, that it’s almost hard to imagine any player actually saying it in this context. What is Boozer thinking? If this were baseball, we could imagine Boozer making a statistics-based argument about the random nature of the short series format, but this isn’t baseball, and the outcomes in the NBA are far less random. Perhaps Boozer is merely reflecting the ideology of his team and his coach, Tom Thibodeau, who clearly values regular-season games more highly than, say, Gregg Popovich. (Ironically, Popovich’s devaluing of the regular-season might be the main reason he edged out Thibodeau for Coach of the Year, an award meant to honor regular-season performance).

In any case, Friedell has been with this Chicago team all season, and his take on Boozer’s future in Chicago is well worth your time.

• More evidence the Knicks appear to have settled on Mike Woodson as their next coach: The New York Post reports James Dolan, New York’s owner, has asked Woodson to change agents, since Woodson’s current agency also represented Larry Brown during Brown’s ugly contract dispute a half-decade ago with the Knicks.

• Kevin Arnovitz of ESPN.com with a wonderful of Clippers’ personnel chief Neil Olshey, a.k.a. the man that got Chris Paul.

• J.R. Smith tweeted on Wednesday night that all those New York fans criticizing his shot selection in Game 5 against Miami on Twitter might just run him out of town. But does Smith actually plan to exercise his $2.5 million option with the Knicks for next season? If so, that would make it even more likely Landry Fields will be elsewhere.

• David Crockett at Knickerblogger on whether Woodson is the right guy.

• Paul Flannery of WEEI.com reflects on Kevin Garnett’s monstrous performance in Boston’s Game 6 win, one of Garnett’s greatest performances as a Celtic. The 28 points and 14 boards were nice — essential, actually — but holy cow, that defense. Boston’s defense for stretches reached that rare state of manic intensity coupled with controlled precision, in which the five Celtics on the floor seemed to be everywhere at once, and yet no one seemed to be scrambling or out of control. It’s a place only Boston and Chicago can reach, and it is bad, bad news for their opponents.

• Royce Young of CBS Sports dives into the NBA rule book to see exactly how big a break Boston got at the end of its series-clincher Thursday night, when officials determined Marquis Daniels, inserted cold late in the game, committed Boston’s foul to give after Atlanta inbounded the ball — and not before.

• About seven seconds earlier (in game-time, anyway), Josh Smith hoisted a 20-footer with Atlanta down one and its season nearly on the line. Smith is a famously bad jump-shooter with an addiction to jump shots, and when he wasn’t wasting Atlanta possessions by firing away from deep, he was killing Boston off the dribble and with his passing. That only made this Smith shot more frustrating, with the inevitable eye-rolling about him just not “getting it.” And there’s something to that, obviously. But too much analysis of any last-second shot focuses upon the shot itself and not the process that led to it. What was the play call? What was the hoped for result? Why didn’t that result happen? Mike Prada of SB Nation goes to the film to figure out how Boston blew up Atlanta’s first options on this possession.

• In his review of all the end-game craziness from Thursday, John Hollinger brings up something I had forgotten about amid analyzing and re-watching all the key plays: Should Al Horford, shooting two free throws with less than three seconds left and Atlanta down by two, have missed his second free throw on purpose after missing the first one? In real-time, I was immediately shouting at the TV for him to miss it, but I’d love for some smart math person to run the probabilities, to the extent it’s possible to do so.

• A really nice reflection of what it meant for Andre Iguodala to hit those two clutch free throws against Chicago on Thursday. And yet all I could think about was how terribly I felt for Omer Asik, who played wonderfully through fatigue in more minutes than he would ever reasonably expect, and then had to face his greatness weakness — foul shooting — with a whole country of basketball fans watching him.

• Kelly Dwyer’s eulogy for the 2011-12 Bulls – and his worried look-ahead for next year’s version — is as good and heart-felt as you’d expect.

• How much of a flopper is Blake Griffin, really?

• J.J. Redick opens up a bit about the locker room atmosphere in Orlando this season as the Dwight Howard trade situation got crazier and crazier.

• Any regret in Washington over the JaVale McGee/Nene deal, now that McGee is playing solid ball for the Nuggets in the playoffs?

• Is this a good sign for the Nets? At the very least, it’s not a bad sign, right?

• R.R. Magellan, writing at the Lakers-themed blog Forum Blue & Gold, on Ramon Sessions:

Ramon Sessions played scared. He’s had so many open looks as the Nuggets treat him like he’s Rajon Rondo. When he penetrates, he’s fine. But the Nuggets are daring him to shoot the perimeter jumper and he’s like a teenager who has never touched a girl ready to go on his first date. Ramon has stage fright and he HAS to get over that VERY SOON.