Derrick White tipped in Marcus Smart's missed desperation three pointer as time expired, lifting the Boston Celtics to a 104-103 win and forcing a game seven on Monday that seemed improbable less than a week ago when Miami humiliated Boston 128-102 to take a 3-0 series lead. Jayson Tatum scored a game-high 31 points, grabbed a team-high 12 rebounds, and dished for five assists. This was his fourth 30-10 performance in an elimination game, breaking a tie with Larry Bird and Kevin McHale for the most such games in Celtics history. Tatum shot 8-22 from the field, but he made all 15 of his free throws. Tatum's size and versatility have been key for the Celtics in their three wins. Jaylen Brown had 26 points, 10 rebounds, and three assists. Marcus Smart added 21 points on 7-15 field goal shooting, including 4-11 from three point range (the shot that is often available when the Heat's zone defense tilts toward Tatum's paint attacks). White had 11 points and a team-high six assists.
Butler had a team-high 24 points, plus 11 rebounds, and eight assists, but he shot just 5-21 from the field. He made three straight free throws with 3.0 seconds left in the fourth quarter to provide what would have been the winning margin had White not scored at the buzzer. Butler scored 15 fourth quarter points on 3-5 field goal shooting and 8-10 free throw shooting, but the Heat need for him to be that aggressive in seeking out his shot for the whole game; TNT's Stan Van Gundy mentioned that at times Butler seemed intimidated by Boston's size. Caleb Martin had 21 points and a game-high 15 rebounds. Gabe Vincent scored 15 points but he shot just 6-18 from the field, and he had no assists in 41 minutes. Duncan Robinson scored 13 points off of the bench. Bam Adebayo had 11 points, 13 rebounds, and five assists, but he shot just 4-16 from the field.
Aesthetically, this game was not pretty--but it was beautiful from the standpoint of two teams playing hard, and of two teams playing physical basketball in an elimination game. The Celtics shot .436 from the field, including .200 from three point range--their worst long distance shooting percentage in any game this season. The Heat shot even worse from the field (.355), but they shot 14-30 (.467) on three pointers. Each team had 47 rebounds. The Celtics made six more free throws (29-23), but the Heat committed seven fewer turnovers (12-5). The Celtics won despite their poor shooting because they attacked the paint on offense, and they defended the paint well on defense. Although the statistics and the final score indicate that this was a closely contested game, the reality is that the Celtics led from the 3:18 mark in the first quarter until Butler's tip in put the Heat up 83-82 with 7:57 remaining in the fourth quarter. A furious fourth quarter rally by the Heat--keyed by Butler--put the outcome in doubt, but it would be wrong to say that the Celtics won just because of a lucky play: if anything, the Heat were fortunate to even have a chance to win at the end after being outplayed for most of the game.
It would also be wrong to say that the Heat had a defensive breakdown on the final possession; as Heat Coach Erik Spoelstra explained in his postgame press conference, the Heat's defense on the fateful final inbounds play was designed to deny an easy pass to Tatum, and the Heat accomplished this by having Max Strus overplay Tatum. That gave White a path to the offensive boards, but only a perfect bounce right to White could have hurt Miami in the compressed time frame of that play--and that is what happened. If the Heat could choose Boston's final shot off of an inbounds play, a contested three pointer by Smart would be their choice over a shot by Tatum.
If this series had reached a 3-3 tie by a different path, the narrative would be about two well-coached teams that play hard battling to a standoff, with the Celtics having game seven at home based on being the more consistent team over the 82 game regular season schedule--but because Miami won three games in a row before Boston won three games in a row, we have been subjected to idiots calling for Boston Coach Joe Mazzulla to be fired, and those same idiots will probably pontificate about all of the alleged "adjustments" the Celtics made to get back in the series; as I have discussed repeatedly, in-game "adjustments"--and "adjustments" in general--are overrated and overemphasized by people who don't understand the NBA game. The reality is that the Heat--who had the best record in the Eastern Conference last season, when they reached the Eastern Conference Finals--are capable of playing better than their regular season record suggests, and they played harder than the Celtics for the first three games, but the Celtics' best game is better than the Heat's best game, so the Celtics have more of a margin for error if both teams play hard. "Playing harder" is Jeff Van Gundy's favorite "adjustment."
The Celtics are just the fourth team to tie a series 3-3 after trailing 3-0, but the Celtics are the first of those four teams to have the benefit of playing game seven at home. The Celtics enter the series finale with confidence based on (1) being the better team on paper, (2) winning the three most recent games in this series, and (3) enjoying matchup advantages at both ends of the court because of their size and versatility--but the Heat enter the series finale with confidence based on (1) being good enough to beat the Celtics in the first three games of this series (including the first two games in Boston), (2) having a great closer in Jimmy Butler, and (3) having great team unity forged by belief in the coaching staff's game plans (overall strategy, not "adjustments") and belief in each other. In short, it is fair for an objective observer to state that game six at home was Miami's game seven (their best chance to win this series), but it is also reasonable for the Heat to subjectively feel confident even if the objective reality suggests that the Celtics should be favored in game seven.
I picked Boston to win this series, and even though I understood that a Boston victory was unlikely after the Celtics fell into a 3-0 hole I also felt that if the Celtics played like they did in their game four victory then Boston is capable of becoming the first NBA team to win a playoff series after trailing 3-0.