NBA Eastern Conference Finals : Pistons Give Celtics Another Go, Must Stop Boston Garden Hex

BOSTON — Will the real Boston Celtics stand and deliver at the National Basketball Assn.’s Eastern Conference finals against the Detroit Pistons, which open tonight at Boston Garden, or will the Celtics who got knocked down three times and scared to near-death by the Atlanta Hawks show up?

A better question might be: Will Kevin McHale show up?

If McHale makes it to the game the way he made it to Tuesday’s practice, the Celtics might have to defend against the Pistons 4 on 5. Assuming you count Larry Bird as only one man.

Coach K.C. Jones switched practice from 3 p.m. to 11 a.m., but every time somebody called McHale at home to tell him about it, the response was a busy signal. McHale had the phone off the hook.

Hours later, when the Celtic forward heard the doorbell ring at his suburban house, he pushed away from his lunch, opened the door and discovered a couple of cops. They were there to see if maybe McHale had been bound and gagged by Bill Laimbeer and Rick Mahorn, or something equally diabolical. See if the Pistons had stuffed him into a closet, or the trunk of a car.

McHale eventually ended up at Hellenic College in the afternoon, shooting baskets by himself.

“It took eight years for my nightmare to come true,” McHale said. “I’ve always waited for a day like this.

“You know--the game’s at 7 o’clock, you show up at 3:30 ready to go, ‘Grrr, let’s play,’ then find out they played the game at noon.”

McHale promises to double-check the itinerary and set his Red Auerbach two-way wristwatch for tonight’s Game 1 with Detroit at 5 p.m., PDT. The winner of this series gets a crack at the Lakers-Dallas winner for the NBA championship.

If this one goes down the way last year’s Celtic-Piston series did, we should be here awhile. The home team won every game, Detroit taking all three at the Pontiac Silverdome, Boston all four at the Garden.

Same setup goes this time--except that the Pistons take heart in how close they came in 1987, and stick to the belief they were the better team in that series. Isiah Thomas said as much when it was over, and continues to say so. He knows, though, that the Celtics simply point to their diamond rings and banners and laugh.

“We’ll see this time,” Thomas said. “Winning at Boston’s arena isn’t easy, but Atlanta showed it can be done. We’ve shown it can be done. We just didn’t do it when we needed to.”

Thomas might have been indulging in some wishful thinking. In his career with the Pistons, Detroit has never won in Boston. The Pistons have lost 21 straight at the Boston Garden, dating to Dec. 19, 1982.

And it was Thomas’ terrible pass with 5 seconds remaining that cost his squad Game 5 of last year’s Eastern Conference finals and a shot at the Lakers. Larry Bird stole the ball, fed Dennis Johnson for a layup and started a Garden party that didn’t end until the NBA finals.

Thomas has had a year to think about it. “Not a week goes by when I don’t think about that pass,” he said.

It was the pass that denied Detroit a chance to win the championship for the first time since the franchise moved to that city from Fort Wayne, Ind., and it was the pass that denied Isiah a chance to go head-to-head with his favorite head, Magic Johnson’s. The two are best friends.

“Of course, if Mark makes it to the finals against us, that wouldn’t be so bad, either,” Thomas said.

He meant Mark Aguirre, the third member of this kingly trio, who has been Isiah’s buddy since childhood. Aguirre’s as alive in the NBA playoffs as his pals are, playing for the Dallas Mavericks.

Something else Thomas has had a year to think about is the brouhaha that ensued when he and teammate Dennis Rodman made uncalled-for remarks about Bird after the series was lost. Both Pistons have since apologized, Thomas for making a bad joke, Rodman for losing his cool.

All is forgiven and forgotten. What remains to be seen is if teammate Laimbeer has been forgiven or forgotten. He’s the guy whose roughhouse tactics at last year’s playoff incited Bird and Robert Parish of the Celtics into answering with their fists. In Boston, Laimbeer was declared public enemy No. 1, the new Strangler.

Players from both sides profess to be thinking of nothing but basketball.

“With any luck, all we’ll be talking about when the game’s over is the final score,” McHale said. “We hope it won’t be necessary to be talking about who did what to whom.”

Particularly if McHale is the whom.

Once again, the belief exists that the Celtics are ripe to be plucked, and that the Pistons are just the boys who can do it. Yet, you ask around, and everybody seems to be picking the Celtics again.

Why? Home-court advantage. Tradition. Better record. Unseen fear (Detroit’s). Bird. Determination to make Laker Coach Pat Riley eat his guarantee. So forth and so on.

Something about the Celtics still seems to bring out the worst in everybody except the Lakers. If ever a team had Boston where it wanted it, it was Detroit, a year ago.

What happened? Thomas threw the bad pass in the fourth quarter of Game 5, and Adrian Dantley got knocked unconscious in the fourth quarter of Game 7.

Had former Piston Cliff Levingston of the Hawks not pulled a fourth-quarter rock the other day, the Celtics would have been goners again. Nobody but the Lakers, though, appears to be able to deliver the last punch.

“We’re not afraid of the Celtics,” Detroit Coach Chuck Daly said. “I don’t think anybody in this league is. It’s just that they have a habit of doing something right at the last possible moment, and it kills you. You can’t play the 99.9% perfect game. You have to play the 100% perfect game.”

One of Detroit’s incentives in this series is to join some exclusive company. In the 1980s, only four franchises--the Lakers, Boston, Philadelphia and Houston--have reached the NBA finals.

The Pistons figure they have the necessary skill in Thomas, Dantley, Rodman, Joe Dumars and Vinnie Johnson, the necessary beef in Laimbeer, Rick Mahorn and John Salley, and the necessary playoff experience to challenge anybody for the title.

After losing to the Celtics a year ago, they did everything they could think of to better their chances, from trading for the drug-problemed William Bedford to experimenting with the personal-problemed Darryl Dawkins. Those moves backfired, but the team had enough talent left over to put together a decent season.

A split of the first two games at the Garden might go a long way toward finally getting Detroit into a championship round. Because of scheduling conflicts with the Stanley Cup hockey finals, Games 1 and 2 must be played tonight and Thursday. The Piston home games will be Saturday and Monday--and, naturally, they expect to play at home at least once more beyond that.

“We have a chance to win this thing, and I don’t just mean the series with the Celtics,” Daly said.

“But you can’t win the NBA championship without getting past the Celtics, and we should have known better than to ask somebody else to do it for us. If we can’t beat Boston ourselves, we don’t deserve to win the whole thing, anyway.”

Famous last words.