After the Celtics 41-point blowout of the Milwaukee Bucks, Jayson Tatum walked through the tunnel of the Fiserv Forum and talked about how he was looking forward to being home when his son got up in the morning.
Turns out, Deuce would have to wait a while for Daddy to get back.
The pilot of the Celtics team charter got sick before their scheduled flight home, and there wasn’t another pilot available to bring them back to Boston. So after about half an hour on the team plane, the team got back on a bus, found some hotel rooms, and flew back this morning.
“It was tough,” Tatum said of the experience. “Everything's kind of thrown off. But we kind of looked it as a challenge … It was fun figuring it out regardless of how the last 24 hours was. It was rewarding."
Word of the travel issues started to filter through TD Garden a few hours before tip. Joe Mazzulla, unwilling to say anything that resembled an excuse, dismissed the ordeal entirely.
“No. Safe flight, got back, we’re here and ready to play the game,” he said. “We’re here, and we’re ready to play against the Jazz. That’s the most important thing right now.”
Despite what was being said outwardly before the game, it turned out to be a bit of a unifying experience for the Celtics, most of whom had never flown on the same day of an NBA game (Grant Williams had after just being cleared from health and safety protocols, in order to start for a COVID-ravaged Celtics team).
“We was talking on the plane. We were all kind of in this together,” Tatum said, also revealing that he was originally scheduled to take this game off. “We just wanted to kind of go through it with the guys and rock out and play and figure it out.”
It wasn’t pretty at first. The first four minutes of the game featured four made baskets. There were more turnovers than makes at one point. Late in the first half, three rows of section 18 cleared out due to a sick fan. I don’t think he actually got sick because of the product on the floor, but he provided an apt metaphor.
But the Celtics, to their credit, didn’t give in to a ready-made excuse.
“It's tough for anybody,” Marcus Smart said. “But that's part of it, that's life. Things don't go your way and you gotta figure out how to keep going and accomplish what you need to accomplish and tonight that was to come out with a victory.”
The top seed has probably slipped through Boston’s fingers, and it would have been fine if they decided that a Maine vs. Salt Lake City game dressed up as Boston vs. Utah was the plan for the night. And the Celtics might still go in that direction moving forward.
“I think winning is the most important thing, but I also think health is important,” Mazzulla said before the game. “I think we’ve done a good job up until this point of managing minutes, guys are healthy, feel good, so I think we’re trying to do both. If we have an opportunity to win the game, we’ll do it, but at the same time, we want to make sure we are healthy and well-rested.”
But the allure of a challenge seemed to prevail on this Friday night. The Celtics had sent a strong message to the NBA that reports of their demise had been greatly exaggerated. Yes, the Bucks were in a tough spot playing their fifth game in seven nights, but Boston showed its full firepower and potential, and reminded Milwaukee of the deficiencies the Celtics can exploit.
Then, a team that has infuriated a lot of the fanbase by letting inferior teams get rolling against them, decided they weren’t going to give in to bizarre circumstances. The Celtics just let us know they can flip the switch, and they decided to leave it on. The weirdness of it all was almost too alluring not to.
Inadvertently, the uniqueness of the moment and the challenge of something new brought the already tight Celtics a little closer, and it pushed them to fight through the adversity regardless of who was in front of them.
“That’s why that kind of put it over the edge for me to play today,” Tatum said. “We talked about it in the locker room yesterday, before we knew that we were gonna have to stay in Milwaukee, that last night didn’t mean anything if we don’t win today. So everything that happened today, we could have made an excuse. But it just kind of brought us closer together, right? Everybody just was like, ‘It’s not going to be perfect but we’re going to figure out a way to win this game.’”
