Boston Celtics Beat Miami Heat, 115-107: Celtics Resembling 2009-10 Team

For the second time in nine days, the Boston Celtics have convincingly beaten the Miami Heat. Okay, so this time wasn't an absolute obliteration like the Celtics' 91-72 victory on Apr. 1, but Boston led by as many as 19 in this one and came away with a 115-107 win.

Let me tell what we learned tonight: the Celtics are contenders. Period. They are not merely going to serve as a "tough out" in the postseason for the likes of Miami and the Chicago Bulls. No, they can beat either one of those teams in a seven-game series.

Boston is good. Very good.

After a 15-17 start to the season, the C's have gone 18-7 since the All-Star break, two wins better than any other team. During that span, they have bested the Heat twice and have all but locked up the Atlantic Division title, as their 103-79 thrashing of the Philadelphia 76ers on Easter Sunday opened up a three-game lead, and now there are only nine games left to play.

Is this starting to look familiar? Because it should.

Do you remember during the 2009-10 season when everyone declared Boston dead in the water during the middle of the year? Media pundits and fans said that they were too old and that their window of opportunity had slammed shut.

Well, the Celtics proceeded to get hot late in the season, and they then steamrolled through the Eastern Conference in the playoffs and were a few minutes away from their second title in three years (and had it not been for Kendrick Perkins tearing his ACL in Game 6 of that series against the Los Angeles Lakers, I firmly believe that they would have ultimately hung another banner).

Now I understand that the 2011-12 campaign is not the same as the one we saw in 2009-10. For one, Boston is two years older, and the competition in the East is a bit stiffer now than it was two years ago. However, one must take into account that Rajon Rondo, who, after his 18-point, 15-assist performance on Tuesday night against the Heat now has 18 straight games with 10 or more assists, is better now than he was then. That is a huge factor to consider.

It is very easy for this Celtic squad to draw comparisons to the team we saw two seasons ago. They play suffocating defense, have veteran players who know how to execute late in games (how about Kevin Garnett's masterful performance against Miami?), and clearly coasted through the first half of the regular season to conserve energy for the latter portion of the year.

I can say with confidence that both the Heat and the Bulls are scared of the C's. Both squads are waking up in cold sweats in the middle of the night thinking that they might have to run into this battle-tested group of Hall-of-Famers come playoff time. As it stands right now, should Boston advance to the conference semi finals, it would face Chicago (unless the eighth seed [whomever that may be] stuns the Bulls in the first round).

Given that the Celtics are one of the only teams Derrick Rose cannot single-handedly dismantle because his counterpart would be Rondo, that is not a matchup Chicago wants to encounter. Whether Rose and company like it or not, though, it is likely going to happen, and we are going to be in for a phenomenal series.

Assuming Miami takes care of business in the first and second rounds, that would then set up a Celtics/Heat showdown in the Eastern Conference Finals, and who wouldn't want to see that? I seriously believe that Boston, not the Bulls, poses the biggest threat to Miami in the East. I am not saying that the C's are better than Chicago, but I am saying that they match up with LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and the rest of the boys much better than Tom Thibodeau's Bulls.

If you seriously counted this team out midway through the season, let me ask you: what were you thinking? Okay, so maybe the fact that they were two games under .500 at the break provided you with a fairly solid reasoning to dismiss the C's, but you should have known that this isn't just an ordinary team. This is a ballclub with a championship pedigree and one that is no stranger to proving its critics wrong, and it appears that it is doing it again now.

The postseason cannot get here soon enough. It is going to be one for the ages.