BOSTON — After all they had done to get to this point, the Celtics suddenly found themselves stumped. On the first play of Game 7, Jayson Tatum sprained his ankle, landed on Gabe Vincent’s foot and was just never the same.
Vincent slid across the floor and was a split second from missing Tatum. The distance between history and defeat was a toe’s breadth.
The Celtics are used to it. Just before the fall media day opened the season, Ime Udoka was suspended and put Joe Mazzulla in charge of a team poised to win it all. They surfed the waves of inconsistency all year, then weathered a violent storm in the playoffs for a chance to be the first team in NBA history to bounce back from a 3-0 loss.
But with Tatum now just a shell of himself, as he put it, it all slowly unraveled as they missed their first 12 threesomes of the night, never quite catching up to fully embrace their identity. The Celtics season is over leaving history on the altar with a 103-84 loss in their seventh home game as they failed to last a full 48 minutes in the direst of circumstances.
“It’s a pattern that’s occurring with us. We need to dig a little deeper there because some things need to change in that regard,” said Al Horford. “We had a great chance and failed.”
Tatum’s leg injury earlier in the game significantly weakened his explosiveness, while Jaylen Brown could never find a rhythm when attacking Miami’s defensive help. Brown’s frequent dribbles and poor shooting choices consistently took the wind out of Boston’s sails, in addition to complete stagnation across the board against Miami’s high-pressure defense.
Brown seemed to nurture his left wrist at times in this series, and that hand gave him away on dribble moves throughout the night. But so does his decision to play rash three-pointers instead of trusting an offensive system that seems to be going nowhere.
That was the conundrum this team always faced when they couldn’t get out switching stops or bury a 3 to save their life. What’s your plan B?
“Yeah, just a terrible game when my team needed me the most,” Brown said. “JT injured his ankle on the first game of the game, for example, and you could see it was swelling. He couldn’t pull out of there. It was tough for him. My team turned to me for plays and I failed. It’s tough. I give Miami credit, but it’s just terrible work.”
Rob Williams has been battling an illness since Monday morning, according to a league source, while Brogdon – who confirmed The Athletic’s report that he may need surgery for a partially ruptured tendon in his arm – was clearly too injured to play. The Celtics were 9-6 ahead when Brogdon entered the field midway through the first quarter and then trailed 27-12 when he retired nearly seven minutes later.
The world could see Brogdon struggling to even pass the ball, but Mazzulla lasted too long as the Celtics sank into a hole they couldn’t get out of. But they put themselves there at the beginning of this series. Always taking the toughest road to victory, the Celtics eventually came up against a team that struggles with purpose and connectivity more than anyone in basketball.
“The hole we are putting ourselves in is hard. Nobody climbed out of that hole,” Brogdon said of trying to bounce back from a 3-0 deficit. “It was the same tonight. We couldn’t climb out of the hole we created. I thought we showed how resilient we were, how good we are as a team, by partially coming out of the crisis. But you can’t finish it on your home soil? This is super disappointing.”
They found themselves there because they lacked a clear identity. As they trailed 3-0, players across the roster began to point out the lack of a defensive calling card that had defined this side for years. They said defense wins championships, shooting comes and goes, but you can always control a game by making stops. Then things came to a head in Game 7.
“We just go out there and put our defense first. I’m not too worried about gunshots. Whether it succeeds or not, defense is key,” said Marcus Smart. “Because even if you miss throws, your defense can often save you time. A lot of times when we weren’t shooting, our defense was our kryptonite.”
They cannot control what happens when the ball leaves their hands. Smart and Derrick White, who shared the podium for their final interview, were generally the only ones to get their 3. Brown scored 7 of 43 (16.2 percent) from long range in that series, while Tatum scored 11 of 47 (23.4 percent).
That’s just unsustainable with two superstars, so the Celtics’ defense needed to be consistently elite for this team to stand a chance.
“It was a game whether we made shots or not, if we got stops we could stay in that game,” Brogdon said. “This is not a team that will get 120 points. It’s not a team that folds in the transition period and beats you that way. They will slow down the game and play in the half field. So if we get stops it’s a game we can stay in even if we don’t take any shots. But the fact is we didn’t get any stops. That was ultimately our death.”
As Tatum put it, offense falters, but defense can always keep up.
The problem is that this team blends their fights at one end. Boston wants to play at a fast pace and introduce Transition 3s, which of course fits modern NBA principles. The Celtics are all about ball and player movement, and they have a free-flowing offense built on trust.
But when Horford got the ball with the short roll in the seventh game, the distance around him played a peek behind Miami’s defense. Offense is all read and react, but that makes it difficult to sustain creativity in high-pressure environments and develop the kind of challenging moves that Miami’s offense thrives on.
Sometimes the sense of direction is missing – which is not a new concept for this team – and that leads to harder shots and more breaks.
“If we don’t play well offensively and don’t get the shots, I think we lose confidence,” said Brogdon. “I think that’s how the game works. But I think we’re losing confidence and it shows and then there are more glitches on defense because we’re not shooting because we’ve stopped moving the ball.”
Coming out after the loss, Mazzulla had little interest in dealing with what had just happened. He answered questions in a short sentence or two, even answering a simple “no” when asked if the Celtics were overrelying on the 3-pointer for the umpteenth time this season.
As his press conference went on, a lot of things were pointed out that it had gone wrong and “That’s it.” Many coaches use these moments to go into detail about their players and explain why their best plans were thwarted, but he said , they’ve been tough and together all season and now they just have to learn. Brown was at least willing to open up about his feelings and show the world why thinking is so difficult at this moment.
“I mean we failed. It’s difficult to infer anything else from this situation,” Brown said. “But it’s been a blessing to be playing basketball up to this point, one game before the finals. It hurts incredibly and it’s hard to even be up here and talk about it.”
This is usually the time for a coach to take control and inspire confidence, but Mazzulla declined. But as Horford put it, at times like these, it can be challenging to see the forest through the trees and find answers to the problems that went wrong.
“We failed. We failed because we wanted to win a championship,” said Horford. “That was our goal. But I’m still very proud of this group because there was never an excuse. We went through ups and downs, but we stuck with it. Right now I feel like we want solutions and sometimes you have to step back and look at the work and that’s just not going to happen in the heat of the moment.”
Just like last season, they faced a team with a cohesive identity, and Boston’s struggle and talent weren’t enough. But the context of their failure comes from the injury of their best player earlier in the evening. The difference between champions and failures lay in the sole of Gabe Vincent’s sneakers.
Would they have won that game and won the title if Tatum had been healthy? Who knows.
But Tatum was out there and could have been even more impactful if this team could grapple with their identity and find the defensive intensity and offensive creativity that brought them back from the dead over the past week.
Instead, they looked like a team lost when the shots didn’t fire.
“All I can say is give credit to the group we’ve had this season. “Give our coaching staff the credit we’ve had this season,” Brown said. “We had a lot of ups and downs, a lot of things happened internally and so on. we fought We fought our way forward from a 0-3 deficit and got to this point. And we came up short.”
(Photo of Jayson Tatum after twisting his ankle in the first quarter of Game 7: Matt Stone/MediaNews Group/Boston Herald via Getty Images)