If this was a video game, this would be Boston’s final boss. If you’ve ever struggled to beat a game, you know how annoying that final boss can be, no matter how good you’ve gotten at the rest of the levels.
The Celtics are the NBA’s best team, and this result doesn’t change that. They aren’t in much danger of losing their lead at the top of the standings, and if they beat the Nuggets on Thursday night, then whichever voices are screaming on Wednesday will be quieter on Friday.
But that doesn’t change the obvious.
The Celtics got to this point of the season by being disciplined. They have been stronger mentally than they’ve been in any previous season of this era. They have been smarter and more aware of their own lulls, and they’ve been able to pull out of them before they reach 34-11. But on a night when they weren’t those things, they still had the chance to face a demon.
“I thought it was really good for us to be in that situation,” Joe Mazzulla said after the game. “I don’t think we had great execution on some of the possessions.”
Some nights will bring the weirdness, like Dean Wade scoring 20 in a quarter and not missing at all from deep. The Celtics could have defended him a lot better, but once he got going, they really just had to ride out that storm.
Everyone knows that beating the final boss always involves just taking unavoidable damage. You couldn't beat Mike Tyson in Punchout without taking some shots.
But the Celtics forgot the golden rule of preventing fourth-quarter runs: Just make buckets.
The 34 part of the run wasn’t as much of an issue as the 11 part of it was. All the Celtics needed to do was string together some simple, easy counterpunches. They just needed to come down the floor and calmly execute a few of their set plays and you’d be reading a story about how Boston is in a class of their own in the East.
I mean, they still are, but it’s hard to make that argument on a night like this.
Anyway, the other thing we all know about beating a final boss is that you have to have a specific combination of moves to get the job done. There's always some combination of jumps you have to make, or punches you have to block, or something along those lines to get your shots in to win.
The Celtics had the ball with :19 on the clock, which is an eternity in late-game situations. Boston had two timeouts and they correctly chose not to use it after Wade’s putback dunk. Here’s the correct combination of moves:
- Bring the ball up quickly against a defense that included Wade and the frequently-targeted Darius Garland. Do not call timeout because that (a) allows for a substitution for better defenders, and (b) takes one of your timeouts away in case you miss.
- Shoot within five or six seconds. If the shot goes up with about :13 or :14 on the clock and it goes in, then the Cavs are down one and you can set your defense to get a stop. You also have timeouts if they score, and, likely, time on the clock. If the shot misses, there is still time to foul, call a timeout to advance the ball, get a quick shot, and repeat the process one more time.
This is how you extend the game to beat the final boss. Having :19 on the clock with two timeouts is easily enough time to get up three shots by the trailing team. What you don’t do is hold the ball, like Jayson Tatum did, and put up a shot that barely had time for a putback.
Tatum has been in this spot before, and he’s made this exact mistake before, too. At some point, he’s going to have to learn this combination to beat this game.
And this is where it gets serious for him and the Celtics because they won’t get many more opportunities to execute this plan before the playoffs start. Tatum and the rest of the Celtics are either going to get it or they won’t. This is the equation to winning in this situation, and no amount of hero ball is going to change that. If it loses them a game in the playoffs, it could be the game that costs them a series.
They have become the league’s most dominant team because they have followed the path of proper execution and mentality. They have spent nearly 60 games refining the mindset of the ball needing to find the right player, not a specific player. It’s that mentality that's fueled my unwavering confidence that this year’s team is different.
And then they go and do something very, very familiar.
The Celtics actually showed some signs of progress when they were down four late in the game. Derrick White handled the ball, ran a pick-and-pop with Kristaps Porzingis, and then flowed into a backdoor cut by Jrue Holiday for their easiest bucket of the night. Then, after an amazing defensive play by Porzingis to break up an alley oop, Holiday found him streaking up the floor for a layup and a foul.
This is the beauty of this team. They didn’t need to run the offense through Tatum or Jaylen Brown and they got what they needed.
The final boss is always annoying. It takes a lot of losses before the wins start to pile up, but once you figure out how to beat it, it just gets easier from there. If the Celtics can master the art of closing out situations like these, they’ll own the game.