The Celtics needed one stop to send their hard-fought battle with the Houston Rockets into overtime. The clock showed 5.3 seconds, and a tired but resilient group of Celtics walked onto the floor. Jayson Tatum gathered his guys for one more quick word. Luke Kornet, Jrue Holiday, Jaylen Brown, Payton Pritchard, and Kristaps Porzingis all gathered to …
… wait …
One, two, three, four, five … six
The way things were going, the Celtics needed an extra player to defend Amen Thompson and Dillon Brooks. But rules being what they are, Porzingis had to sprint off the floor before the whistle blew. As he walked back to the bench, he made guilty faces to his teammates.
You know what I’m talking about. The one you made to your siblings or friends when mom or dad yelled at you for something that pissed them off. Porzingis knew he nearly made a pretty bad mistake. Unfortunately for Boston, more mistakes were coming.
“We used the foul to give,” Brown explained after the game. “After we seen kinda what they was in, we knew they were probably going to try to get an iso; they tried to go at Luke.”
Kornet had given up a go-ahead layup to Alperen Sengun the play before. He was hoping to be more detailed this time around, giving the one foul Boston had in that situation, but only getting one second off the clock.
“I probably could let a little bit more come off,” Kornet said. “But then I think (Fred) VanVleet was maybe coming around for a handoff, so you kind of just be able to make sure you get the foul above everything.”
The Rockets set back up, but then Joe Mazzulla called out to Kornet, hoping to realign his defense.
“We just didn’t have the matchups right,” he said. “They showed us the play, and I tried to just get the best possible people on to play in order for us to defend it with only five seconds left, and their ability to drive. And I did it too late, and it put our guys in a tough spot.”
Brown and Kornet started to switch but then hesitated. VanVleet tossed the ball to Thompson as Brown tried to recover, but his momentum was going the wrong way. Thompson drove, Brown overcompensated the other way, and Thompson rose up for a floater with no one to bother him.
“That was my first game-winner,” he said in his walk-off interview. “I feel like Kobe.”
Brown looked back on the play and said “I should’ve sniffed it out earlier. But we tried to communicate the switch to get Luke off of Thompson ‘cause he had it going, and they were going to go to him, and the timing was miscued, and they scored at the end.”
He later added “it's always a team effort, a group effort. Coaches, players. We all share responsibility. We could have been better. We could have been a little bit more organized with those. It's full circle. We've just got to be better as a group, more organized in the fourth quarter down the stretch."
The Celtics showed great fight in this game. This wasn’t one of those infuriating losses like the one in Toronto. They had a lot of reasons to not even be in this game at the end, but they kept giving themselves chances to win.
Unfortunately, Brown is also right. The Celtics were disorganized at the end. Kornet will get all the blame for letting Alperen Sengun have a free run to the basket for a dunk, but Brown and Porzingis both chased the same player, leaving no one to bother the passer or even be a last line of defense. Yes, Kornet hugged up too close on Sengun, but there was also no help. Having six guys walk onto the floor for a final possession means someone wasn’t really paying attention. And then the late communication from the bench to switch, and the indecisiveness with which they did it, was the coup de gras.
“We should’ve probably stayed,” Brown said. “But if you can sniff it out early to see what they’re running, cause you see how they lined up, then you try to get one of your better defenders in an action. So that’s what we were trying to do there. It happens and it cost us at the end.”
The Celtics were on the brink of surviving Dillon Brooks channeling his inner Steph Curry. They got zero points out of Jayson Tatum in the first half and still managed to have a 12-point fourth-quarter lead. They let that slip away and still had two chances to get defensive stops and, at the very least, head into overtime.
All the credit in the world for some of the things they did doesn’t erase their mistakes in key moments. They lost again at home, and once again it happened in a different way. It’s like the Groundhog Day montage where he dies in every way he can think of, each one getting a little more outrageous than the last.
“Our guys played great for 48 minutes, or 47 minutes and 30 seconds,” Mazzulla said. “I didn’t help them close it at the end. So I have to be better.”
The good news is Phil Connors survives it all, learns some big lessons, and lives happily ever after. Hopefully, the Celtics do the same.