Jayson Tatum hit a buzzer-beater Tuesday night that will live on Celtics highlight reels for years. But the win came wrapped around a genuinely alarming team collapse, and anyone saying otherwise watched a different game.
Tatum was brilliant. Forty points on 10-of-20 shooting, 18-of-22 from the line, eight assists, five rebounds, no turnovers, in his first 40-point game since coming back from a torn Achilles. He took two dribbles left off the inbound, got to the elbow, and rose up for a jumper he's made a thousand times in his career. It showed a star getting his legs back under him.
But the shot only happened because Boston spent the previous few minutes handing a winless team every chance to steal this game outright. The Celtics were up four points with 4.2 seconds left in regulation and somehow let it slip away. Neemias Queta fouled roughly 80 feet from his own basket in that window, a decision so strange that Joe Mazzulla joked afterward that Tatum owed his center a thank-you for setting up the moment. That's a coach making light of a mistake that should never happen in that situation, from a team that was supposed to be three games into looking like itself.
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RatingThen Brooklyn tied it on a three with the clock essentially gone, and overtime arrived against a team that walked in at 0-3. Even in the extra period, Boston needed help: a foul call that would have put Derrick White at the line got overturned on a Nets challenge, and it took a brutal, unforced decision by Brooklyn rookie Mikel Brown Jr., forcing a layup late in OT when all he had to do was let the clock run or draw a foul, to actually give Tatum the final possession. Michael Porter Jr. put up 27 and 12 for Brooklyn, and Julius Randle scored 24. Boston needed the Nets' own rookie to panic to escape with a win.
Mazzulla isn't selling this as a signature victory either. By his own account, the Celtics were planning to watch the film and treat it like a loss, full of turnovers and mental errors, regardless of what the scoreboard said. When your own coach grades the performance that way after a win, you don't get to call it a breakthrough.
RTGTatum even owned his part in it, pointing to a free throw he shouldn't have missed as the start of a chain reaction that nearly cost Boston the game. That's a guy who knows the difference between a great individual night and a clean team win, even if the fans arguing about it this morning don't want to.
This proved Tatum has leveled up. It proved the roster around him still can't close a four-point lead against one of the league's worst teams without a gift. Credit Tatum for the shot. Everyone else in green needs to answer for how close it came to not mattering at all.
