Miami Heat at Boston Celtics Sun. Feb. 13, 2011 1 p.m. EST

Coming into this NBA regular season, all the attention around the league was centered on LeBron James and the revamped Miami Heat. Even though the Miami Heat weren’t the only team to add big-name players in the summer as the New York Knicks (Amare Stoudemire, Raymond Felton), Chicago Bulls (Carlos Boozer) and Boston Celtics (Shaquille O’Neal, Jermaine O’Neal), LeBron James and company have quickly struck up some team chemistry and are playing as good as any team in the league.

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With a 39-14 record and a first seed in the Eastern Conference, there will be a lot of things on the line this Sunday when the Miami Heat travel to Boston to take on the second seed in the East in the Celtics at TD Garden. This will be a huge game to say the least for both clubs as the Heat will look to show they can beat the best of the best in the East and extend their win streak to nine games while the Celtics will be trying to get back on track after dropping two straight to the Charlotte Bobcats and the Los Angeles Lakers.

In my opinion, right now the Boston Celtics are the best team in the league. They may not have the league’s best record (38-14) and just lost two games in a row to two teams that have beaten this season, but they play consistently well on both ends of the floor every single night. Not only is their consistency impressive, but they also play the best team basketball in the league by getting everyone on the squad involved every single game.

As for the Miami Heat, they have played much better than I anticipated as they have been able to get some team chemistry going quicker than thought possible. The one thing that the Heat do that I believe will be their undoing in the playoffs is playing one-on-one basketball.

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Obviously, when great teams like the Heat struggle on offense it can take one superstar to step up offensively to get the team back on track. Kobe Bryant has done it for years for the Lakers, Carmelo Anthony does it well for the Denver Nuggets and Kevin Durant has made a career out of scoring at will, but on this team it doesn’t work too well in my opinion.

The one guy that tries to do this on the Miami Heat is LeBron James. It is by no means an easy task to go from the man in Cleveland to one of three All-Stars in Miami, but at times it seems to be this team’s Achilles heel.

Against the Boston Celtics this Sunday, I believe Doc Rivers’ and company will look to make this game in which the Miami Heat are forced to play one-on-one and as a result the defending Eastern Conference champions should beat them yet again.