The final 10.8 seconds of Game 3 of the NBA Finals was spent by Jayson Tatum making three-quarters of a figure eight down the court, dribbling out the clock and officially pushing the Celtics one win away from winning a championship.
After the buzzer sounded, he walked to half court where he and Jaylen Brown whipped off their signature handshake and then hugged for the better part of 10 seconds.
“Just showing the emotions of the game,” Tatum explained. “Two guys that was excited, tired, that, after the game, we just -- we're not necessarily saying like one more or anything like that. We are just saying, however long it takes. Nobody is relaxed. Nobody is satisfied. Just at that moment, you know, just told him I was proud of him and he said the same thing; that we've got to keep fighting. We can't relax.”
That's going to be the hard part. Unless something catastrophic happens, the Celtics are going to win a championship. Teams don’t come back from being down 3-0 in a series, even though Boston made it close last season.
But even though that's going to be held up as the example of why Boston needs to finish this off, the Mavs are in a very different situation. The Celtics were favored and going home after winning Game 4 of last year’s Eastern Conference Finals. That plane was going to Boston anyway. The Mavs are the underdogs and are already at home. They know how these things go at this point. Are they going to want to go back to Boston? Will Kyrie Irving?
Slovenia has an Olympic qualifier in Greece on July 2. Will Luka Doncic really want to prolong things, or would he rather head home, rest his knee, and get ready to make a run in the Olympics?
“It's not over till it's over. We just got to believe,” Doncic said. “Like I always say, it's first to four. We're going to stay together. We lose together, we win together. So we got to stay together.”
Boston’s game plan against Doncic has been nearly perfect in all three Finals games. He scored 17 points and had three assists in the first half, eight points and no assists in the third quarter, and two points, three assists, and four fouls in the fourth.
“He's definitely got a bull's-eye on his chest,” Jason Kidd said. “They are putting him in every pick-and-roll and iso. He's got to be able to play the game where he can rest on offense and let others carry the load.”
I’m not sure asking Doncic to spend all his energy on defense and then rest on the offensive end is the way to go, but what do I know? Then again, it does feel like Kidd is out of ideas at this point. Maybe asking your supremely gifted and talented offensive megastar to take a back seat on that end of the floor is just crazy enough to somehow work.
Or maybe not. There isn’t much that's going to work at this point unless the Celtics are complicit in allowing it to work.
“If you've ever been in a fight with someone and you think you're about to beat 'em, you usually get sucker punched,” Joe Mazzulla, Jiu-Jitsu practitioner and huge UFC fan, said. “The closer you are to beating them up, the closer you are to losing … the closer you think you're going to submit someone, is usually when you get submitted.”
It’s pretty clear Mazzulla owns the room, so the players are getting the message. They are hearing him right now, in mid-June, the same way they heard him in December or January.
“The close-out games are never easy, and close-out games in the Finals is probably ten-times of that,” Derrick White said. “I think Joe is a basketball genius. So whatever he says, I'm going to try to just do it to my highest capabilities.”
The Celtics are in a familiar spot. They have a big lead that they’ll almost certainly hold on to, but it’s also a pretty comfortable spot at the same time. Everyone will spend the next day talking about this series in the past tense. The Celtics just need to find 48 minutes of focus to finish off a team that's clearly not at their level.
They need just a bit more poise to get through the finishing touches. They need everyone to come through one more time, just like they did in Game 3, to make Banner 18 official.
“Those are the moments which you have to just live for. We've been in those moments a lot. We just needed to be patient, be poised,” Brown said after Game 3. “We were able to make plays and find a way to win. And we've been in those positions, and we've lost. It was great to overcome that with my brother, Jayson, and with our team. That was special.”