Game 7’s are weird. There's always a Kelly Olynyk versus the Washington Wizards out there ready to take advantage of the other team absolutely refusing to be beaten by his star teammates.
The Bucks weren’t going to go down because of Jayson Tatum or Jaylen Brown. They were not going to simply roll over, single-cover those guys with drop coverage, and let them combine for 70 points on open mid-range shots.
Nope. They were going to dare someone else to do it. And that someone else was Grant Williams.
“I told him let 'em fly. They're disrespecting you more tonight than earlier in the series,” Ime Udoka said after the Game 7 win. “You saw it on the first one that he made and then he missed a few and got a little hesitant, and I basically said ‘shoot the ball.' Like, what else can you do? Stop driving into the crowd and take the shot that they're giving you.
Williams had taken 27 3-pointers over the first six games of the series. He took 18 in the seventh. That's more than anyone has ever taken in a Game 7.
Anyone.
“He broke Steph Curry's record for attempts in a Game 7,” Udoka said. “He’s going to gloat about it for sure.”
He did.
“I just laughed because he said it and I said, ‘We’re both from Charlotte, so it must be a thing,’” Williams joked. “But it was just cool to be able to say – like I remember they told me that I think I tied the record or something like that in Game 7, I don’t know what it was, but I feel like that’s just pretty cool to be happy about. And I guess I have to forget about it tomorrow because we’ve got to get ready for the Heat.”
Yeah. Tomorrow.
Tonight, though, it’s a party. And hey, Williams deserves it. He didn’t come into the league as a shooter but he’s become one now, even if he still has some ebbs and flows to the accuracy of his shot. He admittedly was hesitant to shoot in the past couple of games, shooting just three times combined. He didn’t want to settle for jumpers when he was struggling, but the coaches and his teammates demanded he shoot the ball.
“It’s tough to get in your own head when your entire team, like 15 people, walk up to you and say, ‘Let it fly, keep shooting.’ So for me, it was just like, alright, they’re encouraging it, might as well take advantage,” Williams said. “So each one, as time went on, got more comfortable, kept shooting. And then Ime made a joke, I guess I shot 18 and the most, probably, threes I’ve shot in my life in a single game. It was fun, but it was just great that we got a win.
The final tally was 18 3-pointers and 22 shots overall. Yes, it might be a bit more than anyone expected, but you can’t say Williams didn’t take everyone’s advice.
“I told him don’t get used to that,” Tatum joked. “But obviously tonight we needed it. He came up big, played amazing, had 27 points and in the playoffs, you need that. You need the guys coming off the bench to be a star in their role and Grant won us a playoff game tonight, a Game 7. I’m extremely happy for him.”
Williams (7-18, 39%) out-shot the Bucks (4-33, 12%) on his own. When each one fell, he held his raised shooting arm skyward with a downturned thumb and two fingers. The Celtics, freezing cold from the field to start the game, joined him by draining 3-pointers and celebrating, feeding off the increasing energy the home crowd rained down as each one fell.
They called this series the real Finals; a battle between perhaps the two best teams in the league waged in the Eastern Conference Semifinals. It came down to a seventh game, as a series like this should. But instead of one of the high-wattage stars being the difference, the game was won because of Grant Williams, formerly the team’s small-ball center, spotting up for 18 ... eighteen ... 3-pointers, making seven of them. If this was a script submitted to the team before the game started, Brown would have rejected it out of hand.
“I would have called you a liar for sure,” he joked (everyone jokes when it comes to Grant). “Hey man, that’s what they were giving us. It was almost like they were using that defender to just stop me and Jayson from getting to what we wanted. So we had to keep making the pass. And he was wide open. We trust all our guys. Grant is a good shooter and he came through, man. I call him Grant Curry now.”