The takes were heating up on the stove, getting nice and hot for all the morning yakety-yaks. With each Jayson Tatum miss and miscue, they rubbed their hands together and scowled like the Birdman meme.
The Celtics were about to lose to the Indiana Pacers at home in Game 1 and Tatum was part of the problem.
“I'm so glad we won the game, because I would have been sick,” Tatum said, specifically referencing his horrible turnover in overtime that led to three Tyrese Haliburton free throws. “That play was some miscommunication …. that was on me. But we just talked about it for a quick second, and there was still a lot of time left to try to figure out how to win the game."
The Celtics tested every limit imaginable in the opening game of the Eastern Conference Finals. They had leads and lost them. They played great defense then looked lost. They executed their offense then ground to a halt looking for one person to make one play.
The game was tied with 5:43 to go. For 5:37 of that, Tatum and Jaylen Brown were a combined 0-5, 0-3 from 3. All they could muster was two free throws for Brown, all while Pascal Siakam and Andrew Nembhard were closing the door on Boston with 10 combined points on 5-6 shooting.
The Celtics missed three times after Nembhard’s 3-pointer with :47 to go, two of them after a gift of a turnover from Haliburton.
"That shit was chaos. That shit was wild,” Tatum said. “But just stay present, stay in the moment. As long as there's time still on the clock and the game is within reach, we feel like we have a chance. This core group has been in so many big-time games, big-time moments. We've had a lead and lost it and still won. We've been down a lot and figured out a way to win. I've had a lot of crazy endings in this building, so we've been there before. We always believe."
It was hard to believe after what looked to be Tatum’s last miss of the night, a wild mid-range shot that clanged off the back iron. For a split second, it looked like Boston was resigned to the loss before Tatum took a foul with 10 seconds to go. People left the building.
But NBA games are 48 minutes long, not 47:50.
“Welcome to the NBA playoffs,” Brown said about 90 minutes after burying the game-tying 3, courtesy of a second gift Indiana turnover. “You’ve just got to manage your emotions of the game. Anything can happen. The game is not over until the final whistle, the final buzzer sounds. That was a good example of that.”
With one flick of the wrist, the entire framing of the game changed. When the ball fell through the hoop, and when Boston finally got a stop on the other end to force overtime, all those simmering takes came off the burners. Writers started new documents with fresh thoughts.
What Boston went through at the end of the fourth quarter was rebranded from “struggle” to “adversity.” The Celtics went from “chokers” to poised and resilient.
“I think we always knew that there’s always a chance,” Jrue Holiday said. “We’ve seen crazy stuff happen all the time, so I don’t think that we think we lost the game until we actually lost the games. That’s part of the reason why we were so resilient toward the end of the game.”
The Indiana Pacers now get to wear the collar for 46 hours or so. They're the ones who have to answer the tough questions. They have to take responsibility instead of credit now, just because one Jaylen Brown shot found its way through the hoop.
This is why there is so much more to the game than shots going in or not. The Celtics made mistake after mistake in this game, a few of them after Brown’s shot. They are mistakes that have to be addressed before Game 2 or else Boston will end up in another bind. The Pacers did more than enough to win this game, even though they did plenty to lose it as well. Both teams will wake up on Wednesday with lockers full of “what ifs,” it’s just that Boston gets to contemplate it while holding a 1-0 lead.
“Anything can happen,” Holiday said. “We make a couple of other shots that were wide open and it could be a completely different game. So we’re just the type of team that’s going to keep on fighting no matter how long and no matter what it takes.”
The loss is a crusher for the Pacers. They will be stewing in the juices of this failure for a while. It might have been the other way around if they were able to make a couple of more plays. But the inability to make those plays is part of why they're the sixth seed to begin with. If this was a team that regularly executed perfectly, they would not have fallen in the standings or struggled to get this far in the first place.
The Celtics aren’t exactly masters of execution, either, but they have generally found ways to win these kinds of games this season. It does matter that the Pacers were complicit in their own demise, but it matters more that Boston was able to make the most of it.
The final telling of this story will be of Boston stars, buoyed by some great supporting performances, finding a way out of the weeds and into the win column. It’ll be Brown’s heroics and Tatum slamming the door on the pesky Pacers who were good but not good enough. It’s up to the Celtics to do the work and correct the correctables so this story two days from now is a little more celebratory.
It feels good. It was a hard-fought game and it was important for us,” Al Horford said. “We keep talking about protecting home court and it's whatever it takes. And I felt like we played well, but I want to see how we can be better for Thursday's game.”
