Boston Celtics forward Jaylen Brown looked like a prize fighter who went 15 rounds following Boston’s 115-114 Game 1 victory over the Brooklyn Nets on Sunday.
Brown suffered a bloody nose during the contest — he took an inadvertent elbow from Kyrie Irving late in the game — which led the Celtics’ training staff to stick nose plugs in both of Brown’s nostrils to try to stop the bleeding.
Brown told reporters on Monday that he had to deal with this ailment long after Jayson Tatum’s game-winning buzzer-beater. Brown said his nose kept bleeding every 45 minutes after the conclusion of the contest and it went through the night.
“It just kept going, kept going,” Brown said, per The Athletic’s Jay King. “But that’s a part of the game. That’s what I love about basketball. It’s everything. Not just the good things but the bad things that come with it too. That’s what I signed up for.”
Brown, who delivered a couple critical baskets in the waning minutes of the fourth quarter and finished with 23 points on 9-for-19 shooting in 40 minutes, added the nose plugs hindered his breathing during the course of play, but he kept pushing through.
“If I had to do it all again for that same ending, I’d do it all again,” Brown said, via MassLive’s Souichi Terada.
A nose bleed during a high-intensity playoff matchup certainly wasn’t going to keep Brown off the court and he has the right mindset on how to get through games of this magnitude even when dealing with adversity.
“At the end of the day, it’s war out there,” Brown said, per King. “It’s survival of the fittest. You get hit, you get back up. If the ref see it, he see it. If he don’t, I ain’t gonna lay there. I’ve gotta keep playing. I’ve gotta get up and move onto the next play.”
The Celtics and the Nets square off in Game 2 of the first-round series at 7 p.m. ET on Wednesday night at TD Garden.
