BOSTON — Jaylen Brown walked along the TD Garden baseline during a stoppage in play late in overtime Tuesday night. Raising his arms into the air, he looked to different sections of the arena and called for more and more cheers from the adoring crowd. He deserved all the love after knocking home a game-tying 3-pointer in the final seconds of regulation and coming up with a crucial steal late in the extra period.
Advertisem*nt
As Brown demanded more noise, the Boston Celtics were nearing the end of a 133-128 Game 1 victory. After two smooth rounds nearly entirely devoid of drama, they were escaping a wild, fortunate and breathtaking ending.
“Welcome to the NBA playoffs,” Brown said.
At long last, a Celtics playoff game felt like one. To take a 1-0 lead in the Eastern Conference finals, the Celtics needed to persevere through mistakes. They needed to endure pressure. They needed to summon clutch shots and game-saving stops and, sure, several instances of luck, especially late in regulation when Indiana coughed up a turnover while trying to protect a three-point lead.
The Pacers’ failure to inbound the ball successfully gave possession back to the Celtics with a chance to tie. Brown seized the opportunity with a triple from the corner after Pascal Siakam, with orders to intentionally foul and send Boston to the line, apparently decided hacking Brown before his shot attempt would be too risky. Rick Carlisle defended Siakam’s choice, though not his own call to forego a timeout before Indiana’s disastrous inbound pass.
The Celtics needed all of that, a gritty stop on the final possession of regulation and a string of timely plays in overtime.
Jayson Tatum, who went quiet for much of the second half, delivered 10 points in overtime to save himself from a few days of criticism. If the Celtics had lost, he said he would have been sick after a bad turnover in overtime and an open miss late in regulation. Instead, they capitalized on the chaos presented to them.
“That’s a great way (to describe it),” Tatum said. “That s— was chaos. That s— was wild, but just stay present, stay in the moment. As long as that time is still on the clock and the game is within reach, we feel like we have a chance. This core group has been in so many big-time games, big-time moments. We’ve had a lead and lost it and still won. We’ve been down a lot and figured out a way to win. I’ve had a lot of crazy endings in this building, so we’ve already been there before. And we always believe, in a sense.”
You already know what it is 😏
See Also10 Simple Football Drills To Enhance Your Game - Top Soccer CoachBallots dribble into county election offices though turnout likely to pick upBody blocks and clever flicks behind Bruno Guimaraes' superb Newcastle formHow to Dribble Like Messi: Mastering the Art of Football DribblingJB's game-tying shot is tonight's @DraftKings Play of the Game pic.twitter.com/n4gSqcsHcU
— Boston Celtics (@celtics) May 22, 2024
Did the win inspire more confidence that the Celtics will win the championship this season? To them, it didn’t seem to matter. They stepped one win closer to their ultimate goal anyway.
In the locker room, they have used the mantra “whatever it takes.” If they need to win a slugfest, they want to go ahead and do it. If they need to rescue themselves with a few key plays at the end of a bad outing, they want to figure out a way. If they can’t pile up consistent stops and need to outscore one of the best offenses in basketball instead, they want to get it done.
Advertisem*nt
The Celtics allowed the Pacers to shoot 53.5 percent from the field, but yanked away the win anyway with an ending that packed more tension and excitement than the first two rounds of Boston’s postseason run combined.
“I felt like we hit, they responded,” Al Horford said. “They hit, we responded. It was just a lot of back and forth. I think, despite all that, our group just stayed the course. We continued to work. We continued to try to play the right way. Eventually, we needed some sort of break and we got it there.”
The Celtics nearly cost themselves many times. In the final 1:10 alone, Derrick White pulled up for a 3-pointer that Tyrese Haliburton swatted away; Tatum bricked a wide-open potential game-tying shot from the top of the key; and the Celtics botched a pair of close 2-pointers that would have pulled them within one point with fewer than 15 seconds left.
The second of those, a Tatum fadeaway from 16 feet, would have likely been shredded by the pundits if Boston had gone on to lose. With his team needing three points to tie, he followed a big offensive rebound with a dribble that took him from the restricted area toward the foul line.
From there, Tatum didn’t try to find one of his teammates for a 3-pointer to tie. He didn’t try to produce a layup or draw a foul. His missed one-legged jumper over the top of Myles Turner could have doomed the Celtics. They prevailed anyway.
Brown’s pressure forced a turnover on the inbounds pass. Moments later, Brown tied the game with 5.7 seconds left on a fadeaway from in front of the Pacers bench.
The Celtics still needed a stop to force overtime. On the Pacers’ final possession of regulation, Tatum switched onto Haliburton with force and physicality to prevent even a halfway decent look. Haliburton could only crash a desperation heave off the backboard as time expired.
Advertisem*nt
“It was a hard-fought game and it was important for us,” Horford said. “We keep talking about protecting home court and it’s whatever it takes.”
Horford almost seemed to chuckle as he mentioned protecting home court. He knew how close the Celtics came to dropping the series opener at TD Garden. They could have lost, and would have lost if the final 10 seconds of regulation — the stretch from Indiana’s misguided inbounds pass through Tatum’s stop on Haliburton — had been any less generous to them. If the ending had gone any differently, the Celtics would have had plenty of stretches to regret.
After surging ahead 12-0 over the first three-plus minutes, they allowed the Pacers to pull within three points by the end of the first quarter. After producing double-digit leads in the second and third quarters, the Celtics again failed to hold onto the advantages.
The Pacers bench, a key to the team’s postseason success to date, brought an energy Boston couldn’t match, at least when Tatum was resting. The Celtics failed to consistently slow down the high-powered Indiana offense, but saved themselves anyway with a shocking finish.
“You can’t have any expectations about how it’s supposed to go,” Celtics coach Joe Mazzulla said. “You miss a layup, you miss a 3, you give something up, it doesn’t matter. I thought our guys had that kind of mindset.”
The Celtics needed that mindset to prevail in easily their closest game of the postseason so far. Finally, after almost nothing but blowouts against shorthanded opponents over the first two rounds, the Celtics were welcomed into the playoff heat Tuesday night. They needed to fight through dumb errors. They needed to shrug off defensive lapses. They gave the crowd every emotion from raucous joy to stunned disappointment and back again. The ending to regulation barely made sense. In overtime, Tatum followed an and-1 layup with a sidestep 3-pointer to put the Celtics ahead for good.
“Nothing other than what I expected,” Mazzulla said. “Two high-level teams competing for a great opportunity. So I expect all the games to be like that, and there’s going to be more of that. And I thought both teams competed at a high level. For us, I thought our guys — obviously we weren’t perfect, we can get better, but I thought we maintained a level of poise, a level of mental toughness to just continue to work through some of the mistakes. That’s the bind they put you in, because of the way they play. So we handled it well, and we need to get better.”
Advertisem*nt
Before Tuesday, the Celtics had handled seven of their eight playoff wins by double digits. After the lone single-digit victory over the first two rounds, Jrue Holiday suggested he was happy in some ways to see his team in a closer game.
Holiday’s response revealed how methodically Boston handled the banged-up Miami Heat and Cleveland Cavaliers. For most of those two series, the Celtics were barely tested. They didn’t need late-game heroics. They didn’t have any gut-check experiences. They deserved credit for a boring start to the playoffs, which any team would want. But it was mostly boring.
Tuesday required a more thrilling touch.
Whatever it takes.
It will take more later on. Even after the win, Brown sounded disappointed in the way his team played. The Celtics let Haliburton, T.J. McConnell and Obi Toppin run too freely. Even in Boston, the Pacers were comfortable and confident. Only 22 turnovers, including some very punishing ones, kept them from a huge offensive outing.
“I think it’s always great to come out with a win,” Brown said, “but obviously we got to tighten up in some areas. We’re going to watch the film. I think the majority of it was just transition. … We knew they were going to be fast, it didn’t surprise us, but it’s one thing watching it on film and then seeing it in person. They just got out of a dogfight in New York and it just felt like they were just flying by us getting easy layups. We got to be better.”
(Photo of Jayson Tatum: Maddie Meyer / Getty Images)
Jay King is a staff writer for The Athletic covering the Boston Celtics. He previously covered the team for MassLive for five years. He also co-hosts the "Anything Is Poddable" podcast. Follow Jay on Twitter @byjayking
