Friday night was like bumping into an old friend.
Sure, he looks a little older and he maybe put on a couple of pounds, but man … it’s been a while and it’s just good to see him again. He’s someone you should hang out with more often.
The Celtics came out with good energy, held off some early runs, and built a nice lead mid-way through the fourth quarter in Portland. Damian Lillard decided that would be a great time to remind everyone in Boston who he was, but the Celtics held him off to come away with a gritty win.
“The game is never gonna be perfect,” Jayson Tatum said after the win. “It’s the NBA. They gonna make shots, make runs. And like I tell you guys all the time, it’s just how you respond. In the games that we win, usually we respond. And the close games that we lose, we kinda let the snowball effect and it's tough to overcome that sometimes.”
They responded well in this one, not only in the fourth, but throughout the game. They answered Portland over and over again throughout this game, even early on when shots weren’t falling.
“I think a lot of times we allow, because we didn't make shots, for it to affect our defense,” Marcus Smart said. “And then you know, because our defense was lacking, we try to come and force another shot.
“Just having a short term memory loss, you know? If you open, shoot the ball. If you miss it, oh well, next play you shoot it again. If you get an open shot, knock it down. And once we started thinking like that, I think that kind of took away a lot of our mishaps that we've been having; those little woes where it just seems like we couldn't score the ball or get a stop.”
The Celtics actually practiced what they preached on Friday night in Portland. It certainly wasn’t perfect, as Boston’s 16 turnovers will attest. They had their lulls for sure. But the Blazers were hardly the pushovers they were in Boston. They spent a lot of the second quarter getting the Celtics to play at a frantic pace, pushing the ball to take advantage of their youth.
Boston had to overcome a lot. They spent most of the game building up a lead that always felt like the big landing pad for when Damian Lillard was ready to pull his late-game super stunt show.
“I thought we did a good job in first three quarters, we were just given different looks, changing our pickup points, forcing him inside the three, not fouling,” Joe Mazzulla said. “Fourth quarter, he obviously got more aggressive, made some of the shots that he normally makes. We just fouled them a little bit too much in the fourth quarter.”
Let’s face it, Lillard is inevitable. This run he made in the fourth to come back from a big deficit was not unexpected. “Dame Time” isn’t a thing for no reason. The Celtics have had their issues closing games but this wasn’t like anything Boston had faced over the past few weeks.
This was Dame being Dame. This was Lillard snaking his way into the middle of the defense and picking it apart.
But unlike past games, Boston was able to stifle the Blazers run.
“We got some key (plays),” Tatum said. “I got that and-one. (Jaylen Brown) got a key layup, Al (Horford) hit some big threes, Smart got that steal and made some big plays. And just made some big plays, got some big rebounds So we just responded, essentially.
Just when you thought that maybe this level of response was gone. The Blazers presented Boston with a challenge and the Celtics accepted.
It lends some credence to the thought that most of what we’ve seen from Boston is effort-based. It essentially proves that the Celtics have the bandwidth to understand what good basketball is and execute that.
It’s not that they forgot how to do it. They just haven't been doing it. There's a difference, and on Friday night, the Celtics showed a glimpse of what they're capable of. It wasn’t perfect, but it was the best basketball we’ve seen from them in quite some time.
Maybe there's hope for them yet.
“I think our competitive nature is there,” Mazzulla said. “I think our compass, so to speak, is there and we just look like we're playing connected physical basketball. We have a competitiveness about us that we have to maintain.”