Bullpen troubles? Late inning collapses? The Sox have been dealing with these issues lately, so the offense did the helpful thing and staked starter Bartolo Colon to a 5-run first-inning lead last night at Fenway. Jason Varitek, woozy and eventually replaced, capped the first off with a 3-run homer (his seventh) and JD Drew (now hitting 1.043 in June) doubled in a run as well. That gave Colon all he needed, as he cruised through......

--The Herald followed up on the story that New England Patriot Nick Kaczur allegedly turned informant after getting busted with oxy. They stated the obvious--being an informant can put one in a dangerous position. [Boston Herald] --House speaker Sal DiMasi's buddy Richard Vitale has refused to attend a hearing about whether or not he was a lobbyist for the Massachusetts Association of Ticket Brokers. While all charges are alleged, thumbing one's nose at a......

The pressure's off. We thought Manny Ramirez was the one guy on the planet who pressure couldn't get to, but he obviously had the Quest for 500 on his mind the last few weeks, in between radio signals from Neptune. Now that that's done, Manny can just do his thing, which he did yesterday, homering again and going 3-5 with 3 RBI in the Sox' 9-4 win at Baltimore. Manny broke a 1-1 tie with......

We wish we'd thought of this first: the perfect metaphor for these Eastern Conference Finals. Everybody's exhausted, everybody keeps fighting, and everyone streaming out of the Garden last night felt like they just went 15 rounds with a giant chicken. Yes, really. But in the end, it's the Celtics with a 3-2 lead after last night's 106-102 knock-down, drag-out, stomach-punch Game Five. And with the Celtics' bench almost completely useless, they had to turn to......

Kinda feels like we stole one, doesn't it? The Celtics were supposed to be drained, physically and emotionally, from two long series and an emotional, close Game Seven win over Cleveland. The Pistons - bloodless, businesslike, and used to this - were well-rested after dispatching Orlando back in late February (seems like it anyway). Instead, the Pistons played like a rusty old team with a banged-up superstar, and the C's dispatched them 88-79. Or maybe......

Most of the attention this year was on Kevin Garnett, and Ray Allen got his share. But there was always a sense that Paul Pierce, lifetime Celtic and underrated fierce competitor, was just biding his time, waiting for one of his patented take-over-the-game fourth quarters, waiting for the time machine to 2002. Fourth quarter? Try the whole game. LeBron James, left high and dry by his woeful teammates, played about as well as one man......

This was borderline ugly. And for about fifteen minutes, there was no borderline. For much of the first half, the Celtics looked like every dire prediction about them was going to come true: they were bound to let a home game slip away, nobody had the guts to take a shot, LeBron was eventually going to step up and start carving through them. But late in the second quarter, Ubuntu kicked in. Rajon Rondo, who......

It might be important to remind yourself this morning that the Celtics have home-court advantage, and they could still go 16-12 in the playoffs, 0-12 on the road, and still hold up a trophy in June. But the sad and sorry fact remains that they're 0-4 on the road in the playoffs, and last night they committed the worst sin of all: they were defensively rotten and just plain uncompetitive. With LeBron James still way......

Well...that was fun. If anticlimactic. Pushed to Game Seven by a hungry Atlanta team - or dragged to Game Seven by their sporadic ineptitude, depending on which you believe - the Celtics turned on the gas and utterly annihilated the Hawks yesterday, 99-65, at the Garden. This was in every way what a big game between a 66-win #1 seed and a sub-.500 #8 seed should have looked like. It was thorough, and it was......

We'll just say pitching was a factor in the Sox-Yankees game last night in New York. To be more specific, the Red Sox pitching - and complete breakdown thereof - allowed the Yanks to run amok, and while the Sox got plenty of offense, it wasn't enough, as the Sox got smacked 15-9. Bobby Abreu and Alex Rodriguez homered off Clay Buchholz in the first to give NY a 2-1 lead. There was a little......

You've heard by now about the Red Sox T-shirt buried under the new Yankee Stadium. In all the stories about this yesterday, you'd think at least one media outlet could have mentioned that the Sox' bats were buried somewhere as well. Only a J.D. Drew home run prevented the shutout, and only a Coco Crisp 9th-inning bunt prevented us from breaking out one of our favorite Major League lines (the one where Harry Doyle cusses......

Radio guy Sean Grande said it at one point in the second half; there were a lot of bloggers and NBA experts ready to go on the Internet and write that the Celtics really weren't for real. After the first quarter, they'd have had a serious case. The C's couldn't hit the broad side of the barn, and their vaunted defense was being repeatedly torched by Tony Parker and company. This looked bleak. The Celts......

A year ago, the Celtics and the Memphis Grizzlies were nervously eyeing one another for ping-pong balls. Neither team was going anywhere, and both were playing out the string fully aware that getting too good would kill their lottery chances. As it turned out, neither team had a lottery chance, as the Fates punished both franchises by withholding Oden and Durant. The Celtics, as you may have heard, took the blow as a chance to......

Movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn once famously said of preachy movies, "If you want to send a message, call Western Union.". Well, Western Union is now out of the telegram business, so the Celtics had to send a message to Detroit some other way, playing stifling defense, fundamental offense, and grinding out a win that - well, that sends the message - that they just might actually be the best team in the East. Everybody chipped......

...only makes you stronger. That has to be the attitude the Bruins take today, after having their winning streak stopped, killed, set on fire, stomped, buried, and the earth salted. The good news is, they will never play a worse game than they did last night. It was 6-0 Capitals in the first period. Alex Ovechkin had a hat trick before half the fans had found their seats. Tim Thomas got pulled, put back in......

- The Bobcats are to the Celtics what the Giants were to the Patriots: confident, strong, capable of making a game of it (although we'd like to think that we won't see Jason Richardson celebrating a championship for at least another couple of years). The Celts barely beat the 'Cats in November, lost (embarrassingly) in January, and were challenged up until the end on Friday night, when Boston won, 108-100, at TD Banknorth Garden. Not......

It was the rarest of rare occasions: a Beanpot final that didn't involve BU. Instead it was Boston College and Harvard, with the Eagles leading by two midway through the third period. BC almost blew it before taking control in overtime and winning on a Nick Petrecki goal. So two overtime wins for Boston College. And a very relieved Jerry York. BU beat Northeastern in the consolation game. Pitchers and catchers don't have to be......

Last night was one of the strangest games we've seen in a while at the TDBG. With the unremarkable Clippers in town, the second quarter had a playoff-like intensity to it, with technicals, an ejection, and some really scrappy play. The fourth quarter showed a surprising lineup, as Doc left the second unit (House, Powe, Davis, Posey, Tony Allen) in for almost the entire time. Most surprising of all - the bench played some fantastic......

Tuesday was supposed to be a glorious day. A crowd was to stand in the rain, braving the elements to cheer for the football heroes ambling down roads lined in blue and red. And after the last bits of confetti were cleaned up, the celebratory mass of people would tune in to cheer for their basketball team's winning ways. Clearly, that didn't happen. Instead, Boston was treated to a day of quiet coaches, plea-entering players,......

Today, we're not going to talk about YouKnowWhat XLII. Because there's nothing to talk about. Today, we're going to celebrate two big wins from our two local winter teams. (We will remind you, however, that we'll be live-blogging YouKnowWhat XLII starting 7:30ish on Sunday. Get your commentin' fingers in shape.) The Celtics were facing maybe their toughest test of the season so far. There have been Negative Nellies all over the land saying that the......

In a sense, it's comforting. The Celtics went to battle against one of the other good Eastern teams without Kevin Garnett, and almost beat 'em. On the day of the C's' long-awaited return to national afternoon TV, the script ran eerily similar to the first game in Orlando; the Magic jumped out to a big lead, the Celtics clawed their way back, but ran out of gas at the end. Orlando's the only team to......

The San Diego Chargers are hoisting their macho flag in the sky. One player who has the first name Igor (no joke) already boasted that the Patriots are more worried about the Chargers than the Chargers are of them. Can Igor do math? A perfect record is nothing to sniff at. Bostonist heard on ESPN that Coach Norv of the Chargers told Igor to shut his trap. No sports action last night, but tonight the......

All right, we get it. Now we know that even if we check the Celtics score and see that they're up 14 on the Wizards with six minutes to go, we can't just take that for granted, switch back to the Lost Season 3 DVD and go to bed untroubled. We have to check again and make sure they sealed the deal. That will avoid surprises like last night, when we were troubled to hear......

Let's be honest. We've long known that Boston is at least on the short list for Sports City of the United States. The passion felt by Boston sports fans has long been either heralded or chastised, depending on your point of view. But if you'd told us at the dawn of 2007 that we were entering one of the best years Boston sports teams and fans would ever experience, we would have laughed. Long. Hard.......

Gifts were exchanged in Foxboro yesterday. From Miami to New England: a total lack of competition. From New England to Miami: Their foots off the gas pedal and a non-humiliation. 'Tis the season in the NFL. The Pats jumped out to an early lead, befitting a matchup of 14-0 against 1-13. Brady found Randy Moss twice (been a while since we've heard that!), then Laurence Maroney dashed away untouched for a career-long 59 yards for......

You know the old saying: you can't win 'em all. There are some gentlemen in Foxboro who may disagree, but the theory holds up for the most part. Which the Celtics and their eager fans learned last night at the Garden, as the battle-tested Pistons came in and outlasted the C's for the first home loss of the season. It was a great game, though. The first quarter belonged to Rajon Rondo, including an early......

TO: The Rest of the NBA (address not shown) FROM: The Little Nine (littlenine@celtics.com) RE:Remember Us? --- Hi everyone. It's the Little Nine here. You know, the "supporting cast" that was going to be the one thing holding the "Big Three" back from romping all over the NBA this year? Almost to a man, the papers and the Internet said that Pierce, Allen and Garnett would play well, but they had no support and no......

The Celtics are pleased to announce that they've added an extra level to the bandwagon, and it's poised to start its run tonight at the Garden against Washington. This is the original bandwagon, mind you; not the auxiliary bandwagons the team expects to roll out over the course of the season. Naysayers (and there are some) point out that the supporting cast around Ghidorah is untested and unreliable. OK, whatever. So their starting point guard,......

Fear of the number 13. As in, 13 innings. As in, losing in the 13th inning on an Ivan Rodriguez single off of Jonathan Papelbon. But don't blame Papelbon, on a night when the Red Sox had two runs after three batters, then took the rest of the night off. A night when the team left a platoon on base. A night when - well, it just wasn't our night. It started off well enough;......

Go ahead, admit it. We will. Going into this season, we were counting on Schill, Daisuke, and Josh to guarantee us a .600 winning percentage, and we'd take our chances with the other guys. Not so fast. That guy with the 1.35 ERA, that guy who had the Blue Jays flapping their wings ineffectively all night? That old guy? That's Old Reliable Tim Wakefield, who improved to 2-1 with another bloodlessly effective outing. "He can......