The Rotation: Don’t cry for the Celtics and the best moments from a mangled blowout

Welcome to The Rotation, our daily playoff wrap-up of our favorite stories, large and small, from last night’s NBA action.

Don’t cry for the Celtics, because LeBron is eternal

By Rory Masterson (@rorymasterson)

It simply had to be. We all knew it was coming. Apart from the requisite rooting interest, the fighting desire to see a scrappy team, led by an especially scrappy gentleman facing too-fresh personal turmoil, pull the wool over the best — nay, the defining — player of his generation, Celtics fans themselves had to know.

Al Horford wasn’t going to get them over the hump any more than Serge Ibaka was going to prevent a sweep in Canada. The obvious differences between those two and their respective situations aside, 2017 is still LeBron’s time, because LeBron’s time is all-time. LeBron probably wasn’t mad about Game 3 for the fact that he lost so much as for that it wasted his time. He wants the Warriors in the Finals again. He wants Kevin Durant in the Finals again.

Despite needing no pity from anyone, courtesy of the draft lottery and a hoodwinked Russian oligarch in 2013, the Celtics have no reason to complain about this season, or this moment. They did, after all, hang the singular Eastern Conference loss on LeBron in this campaign. That alone should elicit pride, or at least a toned-down incredulousness at the refs for their clear injustice in this series. Was it a carry? Wasn’t it? Who cares, LeBron carries so much more than the ball on one, lonely possession in a game that otherwise had relatively little to do with him.

The Celtics are going to be fine. In fact, they’ll be more than fine, if Danny Ainge can wrangle the kind of value out of his assets that many have anticipated for years. This is when Vincent Vega opens the mysterious suitcase to see what’s inside. That glowing orange, fickle and brilliant though it may be, could actually be the Larry O’Brien Trophy, and Bill Russell is prepared to call The Wolf on a moment’s notice.

The curious case of Isaiah Thomas — that’s IT4 to you — persists, and will do so as the NBA Draft and free agency play out (While we’re on that, Adam Silver: make free agency before the draft. Don’t force teams into unnecessary shows of appeasement rather than addressing uncertain needs. Please and thank you). Thomas is 28, and is probably as good as he’s ever going to be, which is borderline MVP-candidate good, but he will likely face a plateau and steady decline over the coming years. Age is the tax of time, and it always comes to collect.

Boston could, as many have presumed they will, pursue Gordon Hayward, whose time at Butler with Brad Stevens nearly yielded a national championship. Hayward missed All-NBA honors this year, making Boston’s shot at him as appealing as Utah’s from a salary standpoint, but salary isn’t everything, and the West is the best, a realized Jim Morrison fever dream, if the Doors front man ever bothered to care about defensive switches on high pick-and-rolls. In any case, the Celtics will be prudent, if only because they have to be, if only because they always have been. This is Danny Ainge, serving for set point.

As the sun goes, so goes LeBron; when it explodes, expected to be sometime between three and four billion years from now, the sun will take the remains of you, me and all Michael Jordan Twitter stans with it. The ubiquitous they attribute a quote about roaches and Richards — Keith, that is — to Bill Hicks or Robin Williams, and that same they should find a way to add LeBron to that list, alliteration be damned.

If Celtics fans were hoping for a Game 7, they could’ve tuned into Thursday night’s other Eastern Conference Final, in which a thrilling ballet played out between the Pittsburgh Penguins and the Ottawa Senators. They surely weren’t getting one against Cleveland.

Shaq’s weird toe and the best moments from Game 5

By Ian Levy (@HickoryHigh)

If you were looking for thrills in Game 5, you had to get creative. A minute and 15 seconds into the game, the Marcus Smart his a 3-pointer to tie the game at three. The Cavaliers took the lead back on a Kevin Love hook shot on the next position and lead, enormously, from there until the closing buzzer. It was clear from those opening minutes that this was not the Celtics night and so we, the basketball-watching people of planet Earth, were forced to manufacture our own entertainment.

We watched LeBron do his thing and then made human statues in his honor.

https://twitter.com/SInow/status/867925183411044352

We watched Kyrie do his thing and then we combined two words to make a new word, and added some fire emojis in case people didn’t know what our creative new word meant.

https://twitter.com/World_Wide_Wob/status/867924740064722945

We dared each other to look at Shaq’s toe and kept track of who could look the longest before puking those Skittles we had earlier all over Jon’s rug.

We pretended we were into hockey, as if that would somehow fill the empty places in our basketball souls.

We took the (sports) grief and (sports) suffering of well-manicured dudes with pink shirts under their jerseys, and we fed it into our ever-hungry meme machines.

Next: The 10 greatest mustaches in NBA history

They can’t all be Game 7. Sometimes you just have to make your own fun.