The One Thing They've Never Prepared For
In Game 7's, a team is often faced with something they've never faced. Something for which they are unprepared. The reason we watch sports is to see what happens when these athletes face these situations. On Monday night, the Celtics were presented with the thing for which they were unprepared on the game's very first play: an injury to Jayson Tatum. To say they did not handle it well would be a gigantic understatement.
Jayson Tatum has never been truly hurt. He has only missed consecutive games three times in his career, and never in the second half of a season. He has never missed a playoff game:
It's not just the games played, it's how often he plays in them. In the past four seasons, he's been in the top 15 in the NBA in minutes played, and in the past three, he's been in the top 10 in minutes played per game. In the past two years, it's been top five, and his career-best 36.9 minutes played per game was the third-highest in the NBA this season.
So when Tatum landed on Gabe Vincent's foot and twisted his ankle on the opening possession, it was literally something the Celtics had never seen. How would they handle it? How would they adjust? The truth is, they didn't. Not until the third quarter, when they started running the offense through Derrick White. It wasn't quite too late by that point, but it was close to too late. And it wasn't good enough.
When I look back on this game, I see three main reasons why this game ended the way it did:
- Tatum got hurt.
- The Miami Heat played the same game they played all series.
- Jaylen Brown played the worst game of his career.
On point 2, the Heat didn't do much differently than they did in Game 6. They sat Kevin Love so they could start Caleb Martin. Martin was incredible. It felt like every shot he hit was worth four points. But he's been doing that all series. Just like the rest of the series, Bam Adebayo couldn't hit shots, but the Heat role players did just enough to help Adebayo, Martin, Jimmy Butler. Kyle Lowry, Duncan Robinson, Max Strus, and Gabe Vincent all hit at least three shots. They kept their turnovers to a minimum – just five through the first three quarters. They got good shots, and kept mixing up their defensive looks. They trusted their depth, and they didn't beat themselves.
The same can not be said for the Celtics, and specifically for Jaylen Brown. I can and likely will in the future quibble with a lot of the decisions that Joe Mazzulla and his coaching staff made in this game, series, and playoffs as a whole (I think I saw Sam Hauser on a milk carton earlier today) but there is simply no strategy short of sending a player home that can help you overcome one of your two best players having eight turnovers. Through the first three quarters, Jaylen Brown had the same five turnovers that the Heat had as a team. He'd tack on another three in the fourth quarter.
As bad as his stat line looked – a line that included 8-for-23 from the floor, and 1-for-9 from three – his play was even worse. He either made the wrong read or didn't fight hard enough through screens (often both), and continuously let Heat players beat him to get wide open looks on three pointers. Looks, I might add, that he should have known they were trying to get. He didn't fight through them as hard as his teammates did in the three wins either, but in those games he had Jayson at full strength to cover for him. With Jayson compromised, the Celtics needed Jaylen to play better than ever. Instead, he played so poorly that his status on this team will almost certainly once again be an open debate all summer. For the very first time, I am likely to engage in that debate.
It's not just that Jaylen had eight turnovers. It's that seven of them were so careless, so reckless, so lazy, and they were all killers. Even the one that wasn't, in my opinion, his fault – the offensive foul they called on him when he accidentally made contact with Bam Adebayo's chin on what initially looked like a lay-up and one – was a killer. Instead of having a chance to cut the lead to 10, it stayed at 13. The game would become academic two possessions later, on another of Jaylen's turnovers.
As for the other seven? One was a different offensive foul that was completely unnecessary, and completely obvious, a moving screen committed right in front of the ref. One was an incredibly lazy pass to a wide open Grant Williams, who maybe could have corralled it, but was expecting to and should have been able to go straight up with a shot. And ... "lost ball turnover," "lost ball turnover," "lost ball turnover," "lost ball turnover," "lost ball turnover."
The eight turnovers were his career worst, regular season or playoffs. It tied for the second-worst mark in a Game 7 in NBA playoff history. Only Donovan Mitchell in Game 7 of the first round in the 2020 bubble had more, when he committed nine turnovers vs. the Denver Nuggets. Let that sink in for a second. One player worse in a Game 7. Ever. And the stakes in that situation were considerably lower.
More than the sheer quantity though, it's how they happened. Jaylen simply couldn't do what he does best – attack the hoop – because he quite literally couldn't dribble. So he started forcing bad shots, shots that had little chance of going in. At the game's outset, a few actually did. This, in retrospect, was probably a bad thing, because they likely gave him the confidence to keep taking difficult, low-percentage shots. This game will be tough for him to overcome, and it will be a full year before he gets the chance. It was James Harden-esque, and it was honestly hard to watch.
There are plenty of other Celtics to blame. I thought White, Tatum, and Robert Williams III played hard, and that everyone else kind of faded away in the moment. Marcus Smart made two layups to cut the Heat lead from 22 to 18 late in the fourth, and my first thought was "where the hell was this 15-20 minutes ago?" Those two shots gave him a seemingly un-terrible nine points on 4-for-9 shooting. Please do not be fooled. As much as it pains me to say, Marcus vanished.
This was a great season for the Boston Celtics. They made it further than all but two teams, and showed heart by battling back from an 0-3 deficit in these Eastern Conference Finals. This series cemented an epic rivalry with the Miami Heat, and I hope these teams meet again in the playoffs next year, so that the Celtics can even up this rivalry at two series' apiece. But this was the worst possible way to lose. A team that rarely gets blown out was blown out twice in this series, and the final time came at home. It's a bitter defeat.
In the meantime, congrats to the Miami Heat, who deserved to win this series. And go Nuggets.