The Boston Celtics beat the Cleveland Cavaliers 124-113 at Rocket Arena on October 8 in NBA preseason play, according to the published box score, with a 39-33 second quarter supplying the margin the rest of the game preserved. Cleveland took the first 32-29, Boston's second-quarter burst flipped the game, the Cavaliers edged the third 34-28, and Boston closed 25-17.
Eleven-point preseason wins between conference rivals invite exactly the overreading coaches warn against. Neither team showed its real closing lineup for long, both treated the fourth quarter as an audition, and the score reflects a second-quarter rotation mismatch as much as any hierarchy between the rosters. What film will preserve is narrower: defensive coverages tested, a bench unit's spacing, a young player's decisions at speed.
Cleveland's bookend quarters — winning the first and third — will please a staff integrating pieces against the conference's standard-setter, even in a loss. Boston's closing quarter, the game's most controlled, is the fragment its staff will cite: when the regulars' habits returned, the game tightened.
The teams will meet when it matters with different stakes and complete rotations. October's meeting is best filed as information rather than evidence, valuable precisely because both benches were examined under mild pressure by an opponent good enough to punish mistakes.
Express News Bulletin reports the score and quarter lines from the published box score. No regular-season conclusion should be drawn from a preseason rotation game, and this report draws none beyond the game's own shape.
Boston's depth has been its defining advantage, and preseason is when that depth is restocked: the second quarter that decided this game belonged largely to the units that will absorb injuries and back-to-backs in winter. Cleveland's staff will counter, correctly, that its starters won their minutes. Both readings are true, and neither will matter in the spring except insofar as the young players examined here became reliable enough to be trusted then.
