First loss of the postseason comes earlier than expected ...

Y'know, for the last week or so, I've had to listen to Felger and Tanguay over at Comcast (newengland.comcastsportsnet.com) argue that this series was going to be boring as hell and that maybe the Celtics should have at least one close game - rather than four straight blowouts - in order to better prepare themselves for the second round ... Now, while it's nice to hear the C's spoken of in such reverent terms after watching them languish in obscurity over the last few seasons, it just made me "nervous" to hear people getting so cocky.

Granted, I still don't think the Hawks have a chance in hell of actually winning the series, but the fact remains that they did execute a fairly convincing beatdown in Game Three (nba.com) ... And now, I fully expect the rhetoric to switch over to the opposite spectrum, where Felger and Tanguay are complaining that the Celts are showing a lack of heart and that suddenly they're not as good a team as "we" all thought they were; be careful what you wish for, boys.

Oh yeah, one more thing ... While I don't want to make excuses for the team, the shot clock situation last night certainly seemed a little fishy to me; as soon as the second half started and it was revealed that the PA announcer would "count down" the seconds because the clocks were no longer working (wink wink), it didn't take Nostradamus to predict that we'd be seeing time magically disappear on the Celtics' end of the floor, while the Hawks would receive the benefit of a few extra stolen moments at their end.

Sure enough, it didn't take long for this prediction to come true ... and more than a few people noticed (bostonherald.com):

Both teams had to suffer through the inconvenience.

That was the standard Celtics response to the dilemma of playing without a shot clock from the start of the second half until 6:48 remained in the game.

However, at least one player detected the aroma of home cooking once the digits went blank.

“It was different, man,” Kevin Garnett said after the Celtics’ 102-93 loss to the Atlanta Hawks in Game 3 of their Eastern Conference first-round playoff series. “I think when Josh (Smith) got a block on (Rajon) Rondo (in the third), the seconds were three seconds. Then all of a sudden they called a shot clock violation. That was kind of weird. That’s playing on the road, man. You can’t (complain) and moan about that stuff. It’s called homecourt for a reason.”

The Hawks did respond better to the awkwardness of listening for the public address announcer to count down the last five seconds of each possession.

“We all played ball without a clock growing up,” Ray Allen said. “We’ve all seen a lot of different and weird things, but this really didn’t help or hurt us.”

That’s not to say that the situation was completely free of human error. Virtually the entire C’s bench jumped up in protest when Al Horford had enough time to hit a third-quarter 3-pointer thanks to a particularly long gap in the countdown between the fourth and third seconds.

The Celtics were then whistled for a shot clock violation when, as the ball bounced out of bounds off Smith’s block of Rondo, the announcer appeared to have reached three seconds.

The Atlanta Hawks, masters of the space-time continuum! Hey, maybe the Philips Arena staff just needed 1.21 Jigowatts (bttf.com) to get those clocks running again ...