INDIANAPOLIS — It was happening again.
With 7:40 to play in the game, the Boston Celtics were sitting pretty with a 16-point lead on Tuesday night. The Indiana Pacers called a timeout, and Boston was in position to erase the memories of a past collapses by making one more run.
They didn’t.
“It’s a game of runs,” Jayson Tatum said after the Celtics held on for a 114-111 win. “They’re a good team. We know that from playing them for a long time, they’re not going to give up easy. They’re going to fight to the end. So we just had to withstand that.”
There was little evidence that they would, considering the way Boston had blown leads while losing four of their previous five games. Indiana kept piling on bucket after bucket, mostly by Victor Oladipo, who scored 12 in that quarter in a 21-2 run to take a lead Boston had held for most of the game.
“You could tell, when it went south, you could tell our guys were going to really compete, and Gordon got everybody together after they got the 3-point play,” Coach Brad Stevens said. That 3-point play were points 19, 20 and 21 of Indiana’s run. “The next couple possessions we flew around, we were engaged, we were trying everything we could to win the game, and that’s all you can ask.”
Well, it’s not all you can ask. You can also ask for them not to lose the lead in the first place.
“I think it would have been nicer to win by 20,” Hayward said, but he admitted the experience could be beneficial. “I think it is good to be in those situations. They help you, those are experiences that we all need and will only help us moving forward.”
There are certainly ebbs and flows to the season, and their recent ebb of home collapses was still fresh in their mind.
“We had four games to get ready for tonight, I guess you can say, to get ready for that punch,” Marcus Smart said. “Those other games we were caught off guard. The first game it happened, the second game, third game, we were like ‘what’s going on tonight?’…we’ve really choked up and tonight we just tried to make sure that didn’t happen tonight.”
Smart continued, explaining what he meant by choked up, saying, “We did a poor job of executing down the stretch late in quarter and late in games and teams have done a really good job of executing their defensive plan and their offensive plan tonight. We were the team that executed it very well.”
This time, Hayward got his teammates together at their lowest point, and they responded.
“We just tried to kind of hold it together and I think we made some plays there at the end to help us win the game,” he said. “We just have to be better at the end of those games at closing things out.”
The differences in wins and losses come down to a couple of plays. Indiana, which roared back, missed a potential knockout punch. Boston, which was trying to shake the cobwebs like a fighter whose knees were buckled by a right hook, hit the big shot to end the comeback. If one of those shots goes another way, we’re looking at a much different story occupying this space.
“I think we probably needed it. We probably need to have something like that happen, go down three and find a way to win,” Stevens said. “It’s probably a good thing for our team in the long run. I mean, it’s like we’ve got to get better in the middle of quarter and we’ve got to get better at the end of quarters. But we probably needed that. That was hard. That’s a good thing.”
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