Welcome to the Garden ...

Welcome to the Garden, where the Boston Celtics will take on the Cleveland Cavaliers starting at 7 p.m. The Celtics lead the best-of-seven second round series, 1-0.

The order of appearance of Celtics players on the parquet floor at 4 p.m. was Rajon Rondo, Glen Davis, and Sam Cassell. I already missed Ray Allen, who gets his shooting done early.

Rondo was absolutely scorching during warm-ups. Granted these are wide open shots, but the Celtics point guard shows a lot more range before the game than he does during it. You won’t see Rondo taking many threes during the game, but he buries them hours before it.

The Garden is still pretty empty, with ESPN setting up their over-the-basket cameras and such. Scalpers were already hawking tickets outside at around 3:30 p.m., and a couple of Celtics fans and one Cavs fan were standing near the players’ parking lot hoping for an autograph. Not much else going on, yet.

The Celtics are having a closed walk-through (no media) at 4:30 p.m. in lieu of a shootaround this morning.

Everybody wants to know what LeBron James will do in tonight’s game, and the question on everyone’s minds is whether Game 1 was a moral victory for Cleveland, hanging so close despite a 2-for-18 shooting night by their superstar. On the other side, Paul Pierce and Ray Allen combined to go 2-for-18 (Allen failed to score a point for the first time in 11 years).

So let’s say LeBron gets his 40 tonight (he had 12 last game). And Allen and Pierce combine for 30. Then it’s still a four-point game, with both teams doing a little more scoring. So Game 1 means what it means, which is that the Celtics are up 1-0 in the series.

Kind of takes the fun out of it, doesn’t it?