Glen Davis And Nate Robinson, Or ‘Shrek And Donkey,’ Lead The Celtics

Clearly, the story of Game 4 was the play of the Celtics’ bench, in particular Glen Davis and Nate Robinson. Both players were in and out of the rotation all season, with Davis having a thumb problem and Robinson, well, being Robinson. But last night, they came up big enough where they actually merited their own nickname.

Via Celtics Blog:

“We’re like Shrek and Donkey,” said Nate Robinson after the game on his relationship with Glen Davis. “You can’t seperate us.”

Donkey was the one that provided the scoring spark, but if you ask SB Nation’s Lakers blog Silver Screen and Roll, it was Shrek that gave them the most problems, especially on the offensive glass. The Celtics pounded the Lakers on the boards, which is odd because the Celtics were not a great rebounding team all season.

The Celtics were not a good offensive rebounding team this year. In the regular season they rebounded less than 23% of their own misses, ranking 28th in the league in that metric. Coming into tonight’s game, their offensive rebounding rate in the playoffs was just slightly better, at 25%. Watching Game Four, you’d never guess this wasn’t a team strength, or that the Lakers were one of the league’s better units on the defensive glass this season. The Celtics tonight straight embarrassed the Lakers on the boards. They collected an insane 16 offensive rebounds, amounting to a cool 39% of their misses, leading to 20 second-chance points. In this year’s postseason, they’d never before posted a one-game offensive rebounding rate over 33%.

Big Baby personally pulled in four offensive boards and scored nine second-chance points, en route to 18 for the game. He made Lamar Odom look astonishingly bad. Flashing great quickness and using his low center-of-gravity, Big Baby drove past Lamar to the basket several times and established excellent offensive rebounding position. It helped that for the most part, there was no Andrew Bynum on the court to guard the rim or clean up missed shots. Drew’s knee worsened between Games Three and Four, and he could only go 12 minutes tonight. His absence was felt.

The Lakers might need Bynum in the game to slow the Celtics’ rebounding, because Odom continues to struggle, but with Bynum’s knee problems, that might not be realistic. Ultimately, Odom is going to have to step it up for the Lakers to take this series.