At halftime of Game 1, I was standing in the media dining area when another reporter walked towards me and asked “Are you gonna get nervous when this inevitably becomes a 12-point game? Because you know it’s coming.”
Boston’s lead was just 29 a few minutes prior. It was 21 at the half. Boston had dominated all but the first and last few minutes of the half, and all I could muster was a nod of acknowledgment.
Little did anyone know how quickly it would get to 12, and beyond.
“I think our offense got a little stagnant and it had a lot to do with our spacing,” Jayson Tatum said. “They kind of put us into some bad ways on offense which kind of threw off our spacing and slowed us down. They started to get stops, running in transition, but that's part of it. They're going to make shots.”
The Mavs weren’t making shots very often, but when they started, it felt like it wasn’t going to stop. They outscored Boston 35-14 after the Celtics lead touched 29. Dallas shot less than 42% for the game but in that almost exactly 12-minute stretch, they shot 60% while holding Boston to 25%. The Celtics were just 2-11 from 3 in that stretch, 4-16 overall, with five turnovers and seven rebounds. Luka Doncic hit twice as many baskets as the whole Celtics team, scoring 19 points on 8-11 shooting.
The crowd rumbled with anxiety. Joe Mazzulla called a timeout.
“We just said, just breathe. The game is starting now,” Jaylen Brown said. “This is a moment where our experience shines through. Just breathe, just keep playing basketball. If you got a shot that's open, take it with confidence, no turnovers, take care of the basketball and just play our game.”
The Celtics were criticized for not being battle-tested in the playoffs. Their path was too easy, it was said, and they’d suffer the consequences in moments like this. A team forged through playoff battle like Dallas had the mettle, we were told, to come through in these moments.
But they did not.
“That's the game right there,” Brown said. “When a team goes on a run, you got to manage it, you got to stay composed, and you got to keep playing basketball. It's almost like you just have short-term memory a little bit, like the team's not even on a run. You got to play smart basketball and make great plays … get our flow back.”
Boston answered with an 8-0 run that forced a timeout and grew to 14-0 after. Were it not for two free throws from Daniel Gafford, the Celtics would have actually won the quarter. No matter, though, because they won the most important thing: Game 1 of the NBA Finals.
In a season full of “they lose that game a year ago” moments, this might have been the biggest of them all. They stared a collapse in the face like a bear rolling into a campsite. Instead of soiling themselves, panicking and ending up in a fight for their lives, they stood up to the challenge, got big, got bold, and made the threat go away.
They started to get back to the things that worked. They picked up the pace and made hustle plays. Tatum’s offensive rebound and pass to a cutting Kristaps Porzingis started to change the momentum. Brown’s defense won the crowd back, and then a barrage of 3-pointers from Tatum, Brown, and Al Horford got it back up over 20 and Dallas could never recover.
“They have a tendency to go on great runs. That's going to happen. You have to be able to manage those with poise and execution,” Mazzulla said. “I liked the way we handled their run, because that's going to happen. You're not going to stop that. You just have to have the poise and the toughness to work through it and I thought our guys did that.”
The main reason people picked against Boston in this series despite their obvious matchup advantage is because they didn’t believe in Boston’s poise. They didn’t believe that Tatum or Brown had it in them to hold onto big leads or respond when they were challenged by a team’s monster runs.
The biggest story of the night might seem like Porzingis coming back after a month off and not looking like he skipped a beat, but it’s not. The bigger story is that when faced with the type of collapse that people have submitted as Exhibit A in the case against the Celtics, they roared back with the strongest possible rebuttal.
There were a few columns started by Boston critics in the third quarter. There were some missives on people's minds, and the first few paragraphs were starting to take form. This time, though, those stories had to be scrapped because the Celtics found their way out of the nosedive and pulled the plane back up to cruising altitude. It was a championship-level response from a team that now understands how to retake the momentum of a game that had been slipping away.
“We just took a breath, stayed together, stayed composed,” Derrick White said. “We got good looks, and I feel like that close in the third was huge. Kind of just put 'em away.”