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Dispatch From the New GardenThe Celtics' home court is cheesy and generic. Why do they keep winning here?

By John SwansburgPosted Thursday, May 15, 2008, at 1:05 PM ET

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In a dispatch from the Cavs-Wizards series, Josh Levin praised LeBron James and dinged Gilbert Arenas. Charles P. Pierce was in attendance when LeBron James dazzled Boston during his rookie season. Neal Pollack kvetched about the inanity of the NBA's "MVP race." John Swansburg watched as the NBA dared to trifle with the sports-time continuum.

It's the crowd. You're thinking thunder sticks, but not so fast. If it were possible for fans to distract visiting shooters, you'd expect a pronounced drop-off in free-throw percentage, right? Yet Roland Beech of 82games.com has found that free-throw percentage is one of the only statistics that doesn't suffer on the road. Of course, this doesn't mean the home crowd can't have a deleterious effect on the visitors. Basketball is the most intimate of major professional sports, with fans (some quite partial) literally sitting on the playing floor. I was up in the balcony last night, so I doubt Delonte West heard the gentleman behind me, who inquired of the former Celtic guard, "Hey Delonte, how's your herpes?" But I'm confident even the more tactful types down in the padded seats were giving West, and his teammates, an earful.

It's the refs. What if the crowd doesn't just affect the players but the officials as well? The generous version of the ref theory posits that the game's arbiters are subconsciously loath to make calls that will cause abuse to be rained down upon them from the stands. The more sinister version is that the fix is in for hometown teams in the playoffs, part of a conspiracy to extend series, since more games equal more television, more tickets, more Gino paraphernalia sold. This is a small sample, obviously, but so far this postseason the home teams have won 76 percent of the time (49-15) compared with 60 percent in the regular season (739-491).

It's the travel. One study of home-field advantage determined that the highest winning percentages for home teams in football, basketball, baseball, and hockey all occurred in the leagues' early years. One obvious reason for this would be the rigors of travel, which were more arduous before the private-plane era. When it comes to today's NBA playoffs, it's a bit harder to see how travel fits into the equation. Both teams are negotiating the same distances, and at least in the opening rounds, regional divisions mean you're not crossing many time zones. Road teams have to stay in hotels, but it's not like they're being put up in some flea trap. Then again, lobby life, even in luxury hotels, can have its drawbacks. During their Round 1 visit to Boston, the Hawks stayed in the swank new Liberty Hotel (formerly the Charles Street Jail). The story making the rounds last week was that the owner of Alibi, the hotel bar, instructed his employees to double the shots for any Atlanta Hawks who bellied up.

LeBron James, who finished with a game-high 35 points last night, certainly didn't play like a man who'd been slipped a Mickey. And despite some hearty New England vituperation from the Garden crowd, the refs hardly seemed in the bag for the Celtics (on the contrary). It's possible the Cavaliers missed The Diff, but Cleveland came out of the gate much faster than the Celtics, amassing a diff of as many as 14 points. The loudest noise the fans around me made in the first half came when several voices cried out, "Don't shoot!" when the trigger-happy Sam Cassell touched the ball.

It wasn't until the Celtics put together a run in the third quarter that the Garden crowd really got into the game. But when they did, it made the Celts' 10-point lead feel insurmountable in a way their earlier deficits never did. I'm at a loss for how a sports economist could ever measure this effect, but it felt very real. It was perhaps most clearly manifested in the person of Kevin Garnett. The Celtics are officially ruled by a triumvirate, but K.G. has become the undisputed team leader. Before the game, he conducts his own opening ceremonies, spending some quality time with the padding underneath the home basket (against which he bangs his heads ritualistically and not softly) and anointing himself with a cloud of talcum powder so thick one official scorer has taken to wearing a surgical mask.

Garnett is always a live wire, whether he's on the road or at home. He's constantly chattering—to his teammates, to his opponents, to the fans, and, perhaps most animatedly, to himself—a look of intensity bordering on insanity in his eyes. And more than any other player on the Celtics, he seems to feed off the adulation of the crowd. Last night, as the Celtics started to pull away in the third, and the fans really started to get into it for the first time, Garnett began a series of points, waves, and wags at the crowd, creating a feedback loop of frenzy. When K.G. is locked in, and when the new Garden's crowd is behind him, you start to feel an aura of invincibility that feels very old Garden. In those moments, free T-shirts could rain from the rafters and no one would notice.