INDIANAPOLIS – Jayson Tatum’s favorite postseason matchups are Game 3s. “When you go into an opponent’s house, it’s their first home game, the crowd is excited,” Tatum said. He’s used to the third battle of a series taking place on the road, as Boston has enjoyed home field advantage in at least the first round of the playoffs during six of Tatum’s seven seasons with the Celtics, including a top game. two seeds in each of the past three years. He dribbles with aggression and defends with intensity, rounding his massive shoulders for critical plays on the glass. He feels a moment and the need to deliver.
Tatum viewed Gainbridge Fieldhouse as a hostile environment that he had to silence on Saturday night. The Pacers hadn’t lost in this arena since March 18, in front of this golden sea of checkered flag T-shirts, including a 6-0 postseason mark. Indiana seemed well on its way to extending that streak even without injured All-Star point guard Tyrese Haliburton, thanks to a blistering mid-range shooting display that built an 18-point lead at the 6:04 mark of the third quarter.
Lineup adjustments and matchup tweaks from Celtics head coach Joe Mazzulla helped Boston make its way to another crunch-time game step by step. And who was it but Tatum, who finished with 36 points, 10 rebounds plus 8 assists – the first in NBA postseason history to tally those numbers without a single turnover – and tallied two on a powerful drive with something else more than a minute to go. Tatum saw that Myles Turner had dropped along the baseline and the Pacers center read like a child’s book. If he was here, that meant Turner left his real assignment, the Celtics’ ageless big man Al Horford. And when Tatum convinced Turner, along with two other defenders, to launch into the lane, Tatum sent his dribble behind his back, bouncing the ball once and straight into Horford’s shooting pocket.
“I trusted him to be there,” Tatum said, and Hoford’s seventh triple of the game – five of which were assisted by Tatum – burst through the cotton. It’s the kind of brilliant play that earned Tatum first-team All-NBA honors this week for the fourth straight season. It was the kind of postseason pass that will sizzle on the highlights, long after the moment this Celtics run stops cooking, something that deserves commemoration. “Hang him in the damn Louvre,” said Celtics All-Star wing Jaylen Brown.
Boston, of course, only cares about hanging banners, and this big 114-111 win, which claims a 3-0 lead over Indiana, may be the Celtics’ biggest claim, but the league’s best regular-season team can handle this one really made it through the play-off. glove. Yes, all of Boston’s postseason opponents have been plagued by injuries — Haliburton’s hamstring following Donovan Mitchell’s calf and Jarrett Allen’s ribs and Jimmy Butler’s knee and so on — but this early battle against the Pacers was terribly reminiscent of the Game 2 losses to the Celtics in each of their games. first two series, like the shocking instances where Boston’s high-powered offense looked something like this, until now – Boston withstood.
Their defensive execution lacked timing and tenacity. Outside of Tatum and Horford, the Celtics’ other shooters rattled off shots, making just 4 of 22 from distance. “If these things haven’t happened for us in the past,” Horford said, “it hasn’t been good.” However, Mazzulla has been preparing Boston all season for the specific challenge of this game, for the specific challenge of any game. “Joe always talks about, ‘It’s not always going to go the way we want it or the way we expect,’” Tatum said. These 48 minutes rarely go to script, but Mazzulla preaches that he’s willing to scribble everything over in red ink.
“Joe tried to do everything he could to get us going,” Horford said.
“At one point I looked at the scoreboard and thought, ‘Dallas was down 18 last night,’” Mazzulla said, referring to the Mavericks’ comeback to steal a 2-0 lead over Minnesota in the Western final Conference. “This has to be normal. We have to know that we are going to lose in the play-offs and have to play through it.”
Mazzulla and All-Star point guard Jrue Holiday have been whispering on the sidelines all season about how they can change some coverage here, reverse some play there, to disrupt their opponent on a regular basis. Holiday’s rare ability to guard all five positions from just 6 feet away unlocks virtually any lineup or adjustment Mazzulla can imagine, like keeping the point guard position with Turner — even after a fever has gone. . And so Boston showed Indiana plenty of space before switching to man-to-man with backup center Xavier Tillman.
“We’ve changed so many times and done so many different things against everyone in the league that we really feel like we can do a lot of different things defensively,” Holiday said.
Holiday’s exclamation point of the night came on that end of the floor, a vintage pickpocket in transition, but that came only after the veteran guard, the only Celtics player to hold a championship ring, lowered his shoulder into Pascal Siakam and gave the go-ahead signal. three-point play with 39 seconds left. Then, after Tatum’s last and final drive went wide, Holiday Pacers guard Aaron Nembhard swarmed as he brought the rebound over the timeline. He absorbed a shoulder from Nembhard, who led Indiana with 32 points, and Holiday even had to touch the wood to keep balance. But he beat the second-year guard to the spot, stuck his chest in front of the boy’s chest and poked the ball free.
“That’s a typical steal that he always gets with the inside hand,” Mazzulla said. “He usually gets that a lot when the guy comes down the sideline during transition. I’ve been looking forward to some of these. He didn’t get as many as I would have liked this year. It was a big play.”
There’s just something about Game 3s. And that same pattern, a third appearance that is Tatum’s first of the series on the road, awaits Boston in the NBA Finals. The Celtics are just one win shy of reaching the championship round for the second time in three years. And yet these Celtics know exactly what needs to happen on Monday. A year ago, they won three in a row after falling into this exact hole against Miami.
“We know for a moment that we can’t relax.” said Tatum.
