By the second half, the game had reached a fever pitch. Relying on veteran savvy and an extremely physical style, the Milwaukee Bucks repeatedly kept the score close.
The Bucks owed their ability to stay within striking distance entirely to their first overall pick in the 1994 draft-"Big Dog" Glenn Robinson.
The small forward, built like an ox, was a terrifyingly pure scoring machine.
In the bruising basketball of the nineties, Robinson's low-post game and midrange pull-up jumper were almost impossible to stop.
He monopolized nearly half the Bucks' possessions. Every time he got the ball, he bored into the Boston Celtics' paint like a raging bull, using his sheer bulk to force the issue.
The old Boston Celtics would have been torn apart long ago by an isolation monster this physical.
But tonight, he charged headfirst into the iron-blooded trap Thibodeau had personally laid.
"Big Dog" Robinson called for the ball on the wing again and began pounding away with his back to the basket. But the moment he exerted himself, P.J. Brown's absurdly long arms spread over him like a spiderweb, obstructing his view of the basket.
And when Robinson forced the defense back and tried to spin his way into the paint, Magic Johnson, who had come off the bench, was already blocking his path. With his rock-hard chest and elbows, he met Robinson head-on with a solid collision!
Not only that, Garnett raced over from the weak side like an agile black panther, completing the double-team in an instant. His terrifying wingspan of over 2.2 meters blanketed every passing lane and shooting angle Robinson had.
Bang!
It was the most primal collision of muscle against muscle.
For the first time, Robinson's bruising isolation game, so unstoppable in the nineties, ran into two immovable obstacles at the FleetCenter, plus a spiderlike monster coming over to double-team.
Those two defensive anchors and Garnett's frenzied roaming built an airtight wall in the paint, holding firm against wave after wave of the Bucks' muscular assaults.
Lin Qi watched from the sideline, nodding repeatedly.
He was not just watching his own team's defense. He was also weighing the terrifying potential opponents at the very top of the Eastern Conference.
This place was a true monster den.
In Chicago, that unsealed No. 23 had returned, bringing Pippen and newly arrived rebounding monster Dennis Rodman with him, sharpening their blades to offer the entire league as a blood sacrifice;
In Orlando, that once-in-a-century behemoth O'Neal was swinging his enormous, nearly 150-kilogram frame around, joining "Penny" Hardaway to unleash a youthful storm that would overturn everything;
As for New York, although Pat Riley had left, the meat-grinder lineup of Patrick Ewing, Mason, and Charles Oakley, which turned games into wrestling matches at the drop of a hat, remained the entire league's nightmare. There was even Mourning in Miami, a tough guy newly under Pat Riley's command, preparing to rebuild his dignity through meat-grinder basketball...
Tonight's physical battle with the Bucks was nothing more than an insignificant rehearsal.
If his team's defense struggled even to get past the Bucks, then against the truly bloodthirsty bandits and super-beasts of the Eastern Conference, they would probably be devoured alive.
Fortunately, the defensive chemistry Brown, Johnson, and Garnett displayed tonight gave Lin Qi tremendous confidence that they could carve a bloody path through the Eastern Conference's monster den.
Meanwhile, Garnett's endless stream of trash talk had genuinely shouted away every last trace of his apprehension toward the NBA.
Although the nineteen-year-old beanpole had taken his share of punishment in that jungle of muscle, he had already made all twenty thousand Boston fans in attendance remember him.
At crunch time, Adelman revealed his trump card.
He pulled all the lumbering centers and fielded a shocking small lineup: Sam Cassell, Eddie Jones, Person, Finley, and Garnett at the five.
It was an insanely fast death lineup.
The Bucks' two burly big men were dragged into full-court sprints by this lineup, running until their tongues were practically hanging out.
With his 2.11-meter height and terrifying, guardlike mobility, Garnett flew around on defense, closing out, helping, and sweeping up.
Inside the final two minutes, Sam Cassell drew everyone's attention with a defense-splitting drive. Then, with an uncanny flick of his wrist, he sent the ball precisely into the corner.
Murray stood there.
This "high-altitude gunner," dismissed by the entire league as a "defensive black hole" and picked up by Lin Qi for next to nothing, caught the ball and jumped.
His frighteningly high release cleared the defender's despairing fingertips, clean and crisp.
Murray knocked down his fifth three-pointer of the night.
As that three-pointer cut through the air and dropped, the lead instantly grew to nine, killing the game outright.
The final buzzer sounded. 104-93.
On its opening night, the FleetCenter erupted.
In the locker room, the youngsters wildly poured sports drinks over one another.
This was the first resounding slap this "general store 2.0," written off by the whole world, had delivered to all those old fossils.
Garnett was bruised all over from elbows, yet he raced around in excitement, shouting at everyone he caught, "We won! First win in the new arena! What did I tell you! What did I tell you!"
"You said you wouldn't leak like a sieve," Sam Cassell replied dryly, wiping away his sweat. "Then you blew three assignments in the first half."
"Th-that was tactical sagging!" Garnett argued, his neck stiffening. "I went to double-team Big Dog!"
"Double-team, my ass." Sam Mitchell hooked an arm around Garnett's neck and laughed. "But kid, you took all those dirty elbows today without backing down, and you even pissed them off instead... all right, you're starting to look like a Boston guy."
Garnett grinned, his big white teeth especially conspicuous.
Lin Qi stood at the locker-room entrance, watching these chattering, energetic youngsters.
Then he looked up at the sheet on the wall recording P.J. Brown's and Magic Johnson's defensive contributions.
In this pure slugfest, Brown had posted an astonishing individual defensive rating of 92, while Johnson had delivered a plus-minus of +11 in just fifteen minutes.
These two sturdy shields were what would give this new squad the confidence to challenge iron-blooded powerhouses like the Chicago Bulls, Magic, and Knicks head-on.
Amid all the raucous shouting, Garnett's NBA debut numbers were finally set.
Twenty-one minutes played, 3-for-7 shooting, eight points, six rebounds, and one block.
Radja finished with nineteen points and eight rebounds, along with a full eight assists, running circles around the Bucks' lumbering big men camped in drop coverage.
Sam Cassell and Jones were like two tireless fish, cutting furiously around high screens.
Sam Cassell poured in a double-double of twenty-two points and eleven assists, bringing the entire offense to life; Jones also chipped in a steady eighteen points.
Tonight, the Celtics launched a wild twenty-eight shots from beyond the arc and made fourteen.
Fifty percent from three-in 1995, when taking even one three-pointer could earn a beating from the coach, it was nothing short of a miraculous dimensionality-reduction strike.
A new arena, a new team, a new system.
They had won the first battle.
And they had won in striking fashion, using a modern style twenty years ahead of its time.
In tomorrow's Boston papers, those prehistoric creatures still mocking the idea of "choosing a core with accounting spreadsheets" would probably find this opener had left them choking on their words.
Lin Qi smiled.
He knew this was only the beginning.
This team was still too young, and too chaotic.
The subtle internal tug-of-war over touches between the two wings still needed time to settle, while the proud Sam Cassell was still awkwardly learning how to become a capable floor general in the new system.
As for Garnett, the nineteen-year-old high schooler still needed to undergo an extremely long and brutal period of untamed growth. Countless nearly insurmountable obstacles still stretched before these youngsters.
There was even a talented local kid in Philadelphia sharpening his blades, waiting to come back and "destroy" them.
But at least tonight, on this brand-new night, these youngsters whom nobody believed in had made the entire city of Boston feel, for the first time...
A brand-new era was about to begin.