Jayson Tatum hit a gorgeous 17-footer at the overtime buzzer Tuesday night. Forty points. Game over. TD Garden gets to go home happy.
Wonderful. Somebody get the confetti.
The team he beat was the Brooklyn Nets. They arrived in Boston without a win, left without a win, and somehow managed to make the Celtics work 53 minutes to preserve the natural order of the universe. Boston won 125–124. The sportsbooks had the Celtics favored by roughly 12½ to 13½ points, depending on where you looked. They never led by more than eight.
This is what I mean when I say the Celtics play with their food. It's not that the other team isn't allowed to compete. It's that Boston keeps giving ordinary opponents a reason to believe they can.
Forty-one threes, and the same old argument
No, they didn't shoot 50 threes. Brooklyn did. Boston launched 41, made 11 and finished at 26.8 percent. Brooklyn hit 17 of its 50, including six from Michael Porter Jr., who finished with 27 points and 12 rebounds.
The more telling number is effective field-goal percentage, which accounts for the extra value of a three. The Nets finished at 55.2 percent. Boston was at 51.1. Boston also lost the rebounding count 48–47. That's not some catastrophic rebounding failure; it's simply another area where the overwhelming favorite failed to impose itself.
A bad shooting night happens. I'm not demanding they abandon the three-point line and bring back the 1998 offense. But when 44 percent of your field-goal attempts come from deep, your bad shooting nights can make a winless team look like an Eastern Conference contender. If you keep telling us the math wins out, you'll have to live with questions when it doesn't.
Here's where they deserve credit: Boston scored 52 points in the paint to Brooklyn's 46 and got to the line 38 times, making 30. Tatum was 18-for-22 at the stripe. He attacked, drew contact and didn't settle for one hopeless step-back after another. That part was encouraging. Paul George added 20 points and seven assists. Jordan Walsh gave them a useful 15 points on eight shots.
The frustrating part is that the winning ingredients weren't missing. They just couldn't sustain them.
They had already won it. Then they hadn't.
With less than three minutes in regulation, Boston trailed 109–104. Tatum helped drag the game back, including a feed to Derrick White for a three-point play with 33.7 seconds left. The Celtics led 114–111. Mitchell Robinson then missed two free throws in the closing seconds, and Nets rookie Mikel Brown Jr. tied it with a three with 0.2 seconds on the clock.
Read that again. A team favored by nearly two touchdowns in basketball terms needed overtime because it couldn't close out a winless opponent after getting the lead back.
In overtime, Brown missed a layup with 2.3 seconds left. Tatum took the ball and buried the winner from 17 feet. Not a desperation three. Not another attempt to make the spreadsheet happy. A controlled shot from a spot he could get to when he needed it.
That's a real star making a real star's play. He earned every bit of the applause. His final line of 40 points, eight assists and zero turnovers is excellent. He shouldn't have had to provide a rescue mission.
And yes, I thought about Jaylen Brown. We spent years watching two elite wings coexist while the conversation kept circling back to shot distribution, threes and whose offense it was. Brown's in Philadelphia now. Why couldn't Boston make this kind of deliberate, downhill, middle-of-the-floor offense a dependable answer when both were here? That question didn't disappear with the trade.
The Celtics are 3–1. They're not in a crisis. They have good players, and the season is four games old. But the standard can't change depending on whether the last shot went in.
Congratulations, Boston. You beat the 0–4 Brooklyn Nets at the buzzer, at home, in October.
Yippee.
Now show us you can put a team like that away before the building has to hold its breath.