It's midnight at the TD Garden.
The lights have dimmed to a yellowish glow over the parquet. The cleaning crew is picking up stray beer-drenched placards once set out for the fans. There are stray chicken fingers and tipped over cans of hard seltzer.
It’s quiet.
Just a couple of hours prior, the Celtics were dusting off the Lakers to loud “Beat L.A.!” chants. The many assembled Lakers fans made the building louder by drawing the jeers of Celtics fans as they left the blowout early. Some raised middle finger salutes as they undoubtedly marched somewhere to drink their sorrows away.
“Lakers vs. Celtics, regardless of who's playing, what the record is, that game has always been special ever since I've been here,” Jayson Tatum said after the game.
Ever since we’ve all been here, Jayson. It’s been special ever since Bill Russell was here, raising most of the banners that hang in the building.
Oh, and Bill Russell was here for this one too.
“It’s a surreal moment,” Tatum said of seeing Russell seated in the front row. Celtics brass calls Tatum a pillar of this team, but Russell is a pillar of the whole damn league. And here he is watching Tatum put together back-to-back gems to break out of his early-season slump.
Paul Pierce had a front-row seat for it too.
“Having somebody like Paul come to the game ... I mean, I remember watching him play and now he’s watching me play,” Tatum said, blinking hard and then opening his eyes wide, allowing himself a flicker of amazement. “That’s crazy to me.
“I watched a lot of guys play. Somebody like Paul that could get his shot off against anybody, and he was never rushed,” said Tatum, who tweeted about stealing moves from Pierce growing up. “Amazing footwork, always got to his spot, never rushed, great touch. Somebody I always watched and stole moves from and watched how they played the game, especially on the offensive end. He could do everything. He wasn’t the most athletic guy but he always figured it out.”
Tatum and the Celtics have been trying to figure it out for weeks now. November has been a big Blues Brothers car chase for these guys, filled with all sorts of crashes and wild detours, yet slowly they seem to be finding their way.
“We’re human. Things aren’t going to go as perfectly as we planned,” Marcus Smart said. “But it’s what you do when things go that way ... I think we had some turmoil early on, that’s part of it, just trying to figure out a way to get each other going. And we’re doing it, it’s coming along. Obviously we still have a lot of work to do, but we’re on the right path.”
The Celtics are a .500 team after 16 games, which isn’t really great, but it also hasn’t been costly. No one has created any real separation in the standings in the early going, so the Celtics are still in fine position even after everything they’ve been through.
“You expect to win every game that you play, but you know that’s never the case,” Tatum said. “I think as tough and as frustrating as it can be sometimes that I think it can help you in the long run going through these bumps and things like that. It just brings you more together and closer and hopefully we can continue to play like we played tonight and how we’ve been playing recently and just continue to play like that.”
The Lakers have one of the league’s worst defenses at the moment, and they are especially porous in the paint. They allow a GasHouse Gorillas-like conga line to the basket, and the Celtics happily attacked and scored 56 points in the paint, 11 more than their season average. They could have had more.
“It opens the game up,” Tatum said, specifically referencing Smart and Dennis Schröder. “Those guys are so crafty and shifty getting downhill, finishing at the rim, and finding guys on kickouts, it opens things up because it’s hard to stay in front of those guys with how quick they are.”
Basketball can be so simple sometimes. Find a way to get to the rim and if you can score there, then you’re probably going to win. Sure, the 3-pointer is King, but layups and dunks are the Queens on this chessboard. The real power lies in consistently being able to attack, and play everything off that.
The Celtics have been doing more of that lately. They’re getting closer to where they want to be, even though they’re not there yet. They’ve driven the Bluesmobile through the mall and are back onto clear road, but their journey is far from over.
This is the march of the NBA season. One moment, the arena is full, with blaring fans and legends sitting courtside, the magnitude of their mission on full display. The next, it’s an empty colosseum, with just the crinkle of aluminum echoing through empty seats; a stage being reset for tomorrow’s show for a mostly different set of 18,000 or so people.
“It's basketball and things happen, so, can’t control everything,” Tatum said “But how you respond kinda just shows your character.”
