With 6:08 remaining in the third quarter of Friday’s game, Al Horford sank a pair of free throws to put the Boston Celtics up 30 points over the visiting Indiana Pacers, 87-57. That’s right, the Pacers had just 57 points through two-and-half quarters and only wound up with only 105 at the end of the night.
Boston entered the matchup after two straight days of non-stop criticism. They dropped a very winnable game on Christmas Day, falling 118-114 to the “rival” Philadelphia 76ers. It was a day where many felt that lapses in focus and intensity served as the Achilles heal for the Cs, including Jayson Tatum.
“We got to look in the mirror and man up,” he told reporters on Wednesday. “And we just got to be better. We fully believe in ourselves, you know, the things that we can do when we’re fully locked in, and we’ve done it time and time again.”
Tatum led by example and set the tone on the game’s first possession when he stole the ball from Benedict Mathurin, his first of three takeaways in this one. The rest of the Celtics followed suit and put the clamps on Indiana. By the halftime buzzer, Boston had accrued 10 total stocks (seven steals, three blocks) and made the Pacers work for every single one of their 45 points.
Meanwhile, on the opposite end, the Cs played beautiful basketball, quickly built a lead, and never looked back. They created excellent looks possession after possession and the Pacers had no answer.
The sort of creation that we saw from the Celtics was night and day from what happened on Wednesday. There was no stagnation, forced shots, or sloppy possessions — just connectivity.
“The game is connected, and you can’t look at it from a static situation of it’s this side versus that side,” said Joe Mazzulla. “If you’re having live ball turnovers and not playing physical on the offensive end, it’s going to impact the other end. If you’re not doing things at the other end, it’s going to impact offense… I thought you saw just a better connectivity between both sides of the ball, to where we were able to keep them out of transition and keep them off the free throw line.”
If you want an example of one side of the ball impacting the other, look no further than Jaylen Brown. Brown, much like Tatum, set the tone right away. His first half performance (and also the game as a whole) was legendary. JB sank his first nine shots, including a pair of loud dunks, en route to a 44-point outing against Indiana. It didn’t stop there for him either. He led the team in steals with four takeaways and had no interest in letting fans down again after a tough Christmas loss.
“We just had to be ready to go,” explained Brown. “You know, however the game was going to be played.”
If you ask Payton Pritchard, the game was played with intensity.
“The intensity we play with, the pace we play with the ball pressure, and then just being active off ball, like helping our guys out, say, if we see guy get beat, we’re recovering. We’re having multiple efforts. And I think tonight we showed that we had a lot of deflections. I don’t know how many steals JB had, but like, it was just active, and it makes a difference we get out and running after that, so something we just got to be mindful of, and keep playing that way.”
Boston will have a chance to keep up their intensity on Sunday night when they get another look at the Pacers. It’s tough to imagine that it’ll be easy to shut them down in back to back games, but we’ll just have to see.
