If not for Jayson Tatum’s buzzer-beater lifting the Boston Celtics to a Game 1 victory, the current mood around the organization surely would be a lot different these last 48 hours.
It would have been a gut punch not just because the Brooklyn Nets held a 1-0 series advantage, but because it would have meant Boston ultimately crumbled down the stretch. The Celtics, after all, held an 11-point lead entering the fourth quarter before watching Nets guard Kyrie Irving, who was busy in more ways than one, lead Brooklyn back behind a 15-2 scoring run.
Perhaps one key reason behind the Celtics’ unwillingness to go away, though, was a message from rising superstar Jaylen Brown.
“I remember coming back to the timeout, everybody was starting to get a little quiet,” Brown recalled during a video conference Tuesday. “And I said to everybody, like, ‘This is the moment where our faith needs to be the strongest. We’re gonna find a way to win this game. We’re gonna find a way to get our offensive going. Stick with it. This ain’t the time to fold to adversity. It’s time to turn it up a notch.’ And we found a way to pull it out.”
Brown himself went through the wringer Sunday, at one point playing with pads up both sides of his nose after taking two hits to the area. But Brown, having to stop the game due to his bleeding, continued to play at a high level. He hit a 3-pointer to cut Brooklyn’s lead to 107-105 with four minutes remaining and attacked the paint with a smaller Irving defending to make it a 114-113 game with less than 40 ticks left.
“Yeah, I got hit a couple of times in the face. That’s playoff basketball. Nothing else to chalk it up to other than that, that’s what comes with the game at times,” Brown said. “That’s what I love about basketball. It’s everything, not just the good things, the bad things come with it, too. So this is what I signed up for.”
Brown and the Celtics will return to TD Garden on Wednesday night to host the Nets for Game 2 in the best-of-seven series.
