Well a little bit less sexy tonight as Boston ends up blowing out the Cleveland Cavaliers.

It really was never close Cleveland was put down 32 to 19 at the end of the first, particularly

when LeBron rusted.

Boston was able to surge out to a lead.

I thought Cleveland's defense actually got a lot better.

In this game they held the Celtics to 21, 23 and 20 points, but then they couldn't score

themselves at all either.

And I think that other than Boston's home court advantage, which I want to talk about

a little bit more, the strategy for Boston of going with Aaron Baines in the starting line-up,

matching the Cavaliers big lineup seemed to work pretty well.

I thought Baines did a very good job.

He ended up playing 29 minutes, which is substantially more than he'd been playing coming

off the bench, which makes sense.

And I also thought it benefited Marcus Morris early on that he was had a little bit more

energy to attack.

Not only Cleveland's backups, because Cleveland didn't really do much subbing in the first

quarter, but really Cleveland's tired starters.

I thought that Morris's energy was beneficial to Boston in that later part of the first quarter.

But going back to Baines, his rim protection did a nice job there, also battled a little

bit on the offensive glass.

And Boston actually was a meaningfully better offensive rebounding team than the Celtics

were in this game.

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