If there's one thing we can expect the Knicks to do in Boston, it’s give the Celtics a fight.
“I mean, in any fight, you're gonna have bruises,” Joe Mazzulla said. “If you get into a fight, and you don't have any bruises, that's called bullying. And if you get into a fight and you have some, that’s a real fight. And so I enjoy those. I love games like this.”
A real fight can reveal someone’s true character. How much heart they have and what they're willing to accept becomes pretty obvious, pretty quickly in those kinds of situations.
The Celtics, a team not recently known for their toughness, answered the bell.
Down by eight and not looking their best, the Celtics did something they weren’t really known for in the past. They closed the half on a big run, highlighted by a Jaylen Brown buzzer-beating 3 off a Jayson Tatum assist, and went into the half down one.
“Joe told us in the first half that you got outplayed. They played harder than you did, they were a tougher team,” Tatum said. “It was kind of unacceptable, but, you know, we were only down one, so we were fortunate to be in that spot and knew we had a chance.”
Boston used runs of 13-4 and 12-4 to end the second and third quarters and completely flip the game. They went from down eight to up eight, and with the momentum their MVP candidate was feeling having finally broken out of an 0-6 start to the game from deep.
“It was the first time all season where I felt like we weren't what we have been, which is a good thing because it allows us to respond,” Mazzulla said. “I thought our guys did a great job of that. But against this team, one of the best things they do — I said at pregame — is they go on 8 to 10-0 runs on transition threes, offensive rebound threes, and and-ones, and we took a bunch of those, especially at the end of quarters.”
There's something about those final few minutes of a quarter. When a team is down but goes on a run against the clock, it builds anticipation in the building. As the time ticks down, people know possessions get more and more precious. As the momentum builds, so does the energy in the building. When the buzzer sounds and a team has either climbed back into a game or re-claimed a lead, it can be deflating to the other team.
“Closing quarters is the difference between winning and losing games,” Brown said. “I felt like we closed the second half pretty well and went on a run where I thought we were getting outplayed a little bit in the first half, but we ended up closing the quarter really well, went into the half feeling good about ourselves.”
The formula of a hero getting beaten up but finding the wherewithal to come back, throw punches of his own, and ride momentum to a rousing win is always a feel-good story. It’s the Hulk Hogan playbook. Tatum followed the script so perfectly that when his final 3-pointer fell to give Boston a 114-97 lead with 1:14 left, he could have dropped the big leg on Julius Randle and gotten a 3-count right on the center court logo and it would have made sense.
It’s not exactly a script some of these guys would have followed in the past.
“I think that's gonna be a test, being able to match teams' physicality, night in and night out,” Brown said. “I think tonight was a great opportunity to do so, and we did. So I think that games like this are fun, toughing it out, using our physicality, you know what I mean? Figuring it out down the stretch, and I think that's what we did tonight.”
It actually is fun. I don’t want to go all Tyler Durden here but sometimes you need to get punched in the mouth to realize there's something invigorating about being in the fight. As a coach, you need to see your team get punched at times like this to see how they’ll respond.
Every coach wants to know what kind of group he has every year. Even with some of the same players, the identity can change from season to season.
“There's a sense of gratitude there where it's like you know who you are as a team because you're not playing as well as you can be, and you're only down one,” Mazzulla said. “And you’ve got to be thankful for that because it could be a lot worse. And I thought our guys just stuck with it with the right mindset.”
One of Kevin Garnett’s most memorable postgame walk-off interviews was his “bar fight” rant with Craig Sager. A great team has to win those bar fights. These Celtics haven't exactly been known for doing that. Maybe this year, that's changing for the better.