The Box

There are times that players will do things integral to winning a game that don't show in the box score. In football it's sometimes a crushing block that sends a message (see Drew Bledsoe's crack-back on a Jets defender in 2002 while QB'ing the Bills...it was a decleater).

In game seven against the Cavs, it was Eddie House.

The game was won on the shoulders of the long-suffering Paul Pierce who stepped up big and refused to loose, but the tone was set in the second quarter by Eddie House. House outran Wally Szczerbiak to a loose ball that went almost the length of the court, starting in the Cav's end of the parquet. The journeyman guard who has played for eight franchises in his eight NBA seasons absolutely sacrificed his body, catching up to the ball just before going out of bounds, tapping it back to teammate James Posey.

Posey, showing the same presence of mind that House did in tapping the ball back to him, turned and shot in spite of the fact that his momentum was bringing him out of bounds under the basket. He got the foul and sunk the two frees.

The points might show as Posey's in the box, but those were House's baskets.

That doesn't even take into account for when House channeled Larry Bird on the Cavs inbound pass in the games fading seconds. The AP described it well -

But Eddie House intercepted the pass and, as the final seconds ticked off, James turned and walked toward his bench, his chances of reaching the East finals dashed on the court where the Cavaliers were 0-6 this season.

My question - if this game acts as a catalyst for the Celtics to finally look like the team on the road that they were during the season, will the Eddie House hustle-play be looked at as the spark? Will it be JR Redmond diving for the sideline to stop the clock, dragging two defenders with him? Will it be Dave Roberts sparking a Red Sox rally? Or will it be just another great play lost to a box score that has no accounting for it?