Some days you just don’t have it.
Some days I sit here staring at my screen, begging my brain to spit out some combination of nouns, verbs, and adjectives that make sense, and my brain comes back with white noise.
Some days, a basketball team shows up at the arena and, somehow, an entire collection of human beings finds themselves missing shots they’ve been making all season. It’s like Mr. Burns tempting fate when he put the all-ringer softball team together.
'The Celtics will win, unless, of course, the nine shooters fall victim to nine separate misfortunes and are unable to hit a shot. But that will never happen. Three misfortunes, that's possible. Seven misfortunes, there's an outside chance. But nine misfortunes? I'd like to see that!'
The Celtics' five starters through three quarters were a collective 3-21. Their four bench players were a much-less horrible but still not great 3-8. To the best of my knowledge, none had fallen victim to gigantism or radiation exposure at the nuclear power plant.
There was no energy in the building. They had nothing. The Thunder, even on the back-to-back, looked young and fresh, like they had something to prove on an NBA TV game against one of the NBA’s elite teams. The Celtics looked bored and disinterested, like an actor going through motions on a set. They got to their spots, they stood in the light, and they delivered their lines. But the whole performance was empty.
Then Payton Pritchard checked into the game with 2:41 to play in the third quarter.
“Changed the whole game, the whole trajectory,” Jaylen Brown said. “And you gotta give credit where credit's due, Payton, I love that guy, how he comes in and he's just ready to go and that's tough to do in this league, not knowing if your name is gonna be called. And then just come in and just give us automatic energy just like he did? That was amazing.”
The Celtics closed the quarter on an 8-2 run after Pritchard entered. He and Derrick White combined to give Boston the B-12 shot it needed.
“We were on the bench there and we all kind of looked at each other like, we gotta change the energy of the game,” White said. “That’s what our job is as a bench unit, and I think we did a good job of going in there and kind of turning the game a little bit. As a bench, that’s what we have to do every time.”
The most important thing White and Pritchard brought was defense. Pritchard’s five quick points came in a stretch where he and White each came up with steals. The best of them was the last-second trap that stripped the ball away from Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and gave Pritchard enough time to dart in for the buzzer-beating layup.
The Celtics had looked like they were playing in mud, but suddenly, they started to move. In the 14:41 after Pritchard came back into the game, the Celtics forced 9 Thunder turnovers, they started running, and they shot 5-10 from 3.
“It gives you the energy you need, because when you see those guys and you’re happy for them, then all of a sudden you’re filled with adrenaline,” Marcus Smart said while appropriately wearing a Jaylen Brown ‘The Energy Is About To Shift’ T-shirt. “All of a sudden you get that second wind and say, ‘You know what? I’m gonna keep pushing, I’m gonna keep going.’ And then the mud starts to loosen up a little bit, and then you got one foot out of the mud, and then you can get your other one, and now you’re off rolling. So when those two came in, that’s exactly what it did.”
The Thunder are a high-scoring team that loves to run off turnovers, and the Celtics were all too happy to provide OKC with 11 of them through three quarters, leading to 19 Thunder points. Aleksej Pokusevski was protecting the rim like Dikembe Mutombo.
White and Pritchard shifted the energy enough to snap everything back into place. Smart was attacking and finishing. Jayson Tatum broke out of his slump. The Celtics had scored 82 points in 32:19 prior to the 2:41 mark of the third, or about 2.56 points per minute. They scored 45 over the last 14:41, a little over 3 points per minute. If they’d scored at that rate the whole game, they would have put up 146.
“We have the humility to understand we can play in a different way,” Joe Mazzulla said. “When someone doesn't have it, the next guy's gotta be ready to bring it. I thought that's what we did. There's going to be moments like that. There's going to be moments when things aren't going our way. So it just comes down to how can we execute and how can we find guys that can give us a lift."
The Celtics weren’t getting what they needed from the guys who usually provide the energy, so they had to find it somewhere else to keep their streak going. They did, and they are hitting the road with the league’s best record.
“I was extremely proud of the way that we responded, the way that we competed and figured it out,” Tatum said. “It wasn't pretty. Obviously some things we wish we could have done better, but (OKC is) a talented team, and that's a good win.”