Celtics give credit to hot-shooting Heat, but nobody’s playing the adversity card.
BOSTON — Given the manner in which the Miami Heat went about their business Wednesday might — hitting on a franchise-record 23 3-pointers in their 111-101 victory over the Celtics at TD Garden — it was only natural that Celtics coach Joe Mazzulla would be asked a flurry of questions about Miami’s flurry of treys.
And that’s exactly what happened, with Mazzulla getting quizzed about the sheer volume of 3-point attempts the Heat were able to generate — 43 of them! — and what can be done about that as the series, now deadlocked at a win apiece, shifts to Miami Saturday night.
But then Mazzulla was delivered a Hallmark greeting card by a reporter who wondered if losing a playoff game can be a good thing, what with being given an opportunity to, you know, face some adversity.
Mazzulla would have been excused had he chosen to shoot that one out of a cannon. Instead, he chose diplomacy.
“The thing you’re going to go through in a playoff series however long it lasts … it’s unfortunate that losing a game is adversity,” is how he responded. “It’s just the nature of the playoffs.”
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Now make no mistake: If the Celtics go on to wipe out a worthy Western Conference opponent in the NBA Finals, there’s a good chance somebody in a green championship T-shirt will harken back to that late April night at TD Garden when the Celtics lost Game 2 of the Eastern Conference semifinals to Miami. There will be grand speeches at the rolling rally about how the Celtics came together as a team after that game and how they — wait for it, wait for it — overcame adversity.
But that’s all later on, assuming there is a later on. In the here and now, the Celtics need to dispatch the undermanned Heat as neatly and quickly as possible, all the better to prepare for tougher battles ahead. And if the Celtics want to make history, they need to know their history. They need to know that, last year, a no-great-shakes edition of the Heat upset the Milwaukee Bucks in the first round. And the Celtics needn’t be reminded that they lost to the Heat in last year’s Eastern Conference finals — after winning three straight games to even the series and then getting blown out in Game 7.
So, no, the Celtics don’t need to learn from adversity. Been there, done that.
But perhaps they do need to be reminded that, as a set-up to Wednesday’s Game 2, the Heat turned what was well on the way to being a blowout loss to the Celtics into a closer-than-it-should-have-been outcome, this on the strength of a strong fourth quarter.
The fact is, the Celtics learned nothing Wednesday night other than that Heat coach Erik Spoelstra came in with a game plan to have his players launch a lot of 3s, and that said players executed that game plan in a hugely entertaining fashion (if you’re not a Celtics fan). Three-pointers in a vacuum are a certain kind of pretty, but a parade of 3-pointers is pure magic. And with seven Miami players connecting on 3-pointers, including six by Tyler Herro and five by Caleb Martin, that’s a ton of magic.
As the Celtics’ Jaylen Brown put it, not incorrectly, “I think they’re well-coached … they put together a good game plan for them, and they felt confident and came out and executed.”
Said Jayson Tatum, also not incorrectly, “The playoffs are about making adjustments from game to game, and they did that.”
Brown (33 points) and Tatum (28 points) were the game’s high scorers. One would have thought these two Celtics veterans were going to lead Boston to an easy victory based on what they were doing in the first half. Tatum was a veritable smorgasbord in the early going, as when he plowed through the paint as though going for a first down on third-and-6 to give the Celtics an early 6-4 lead … or when he took a running alley-oop from Brown and slammed it home to make it 11-9 … or when he hit nothing but net down the middle from 27 feet out to make it 14-9 … or when he hit a pretty fadeaway jumper in the second quarter. As for Brown, he went on a tear in the last couple of minutes of the first half, including three 3-pointers and a running layup.
