This was a weird one. For a half, the Hawks looked to be as Boston coach Brad Stevens had characterized them before Saturday’s Game 1 — the Eastern Conference team playing the best basketball entering the playoffs. (Never mind that the Hawks lost their final two games entering the playoffs.) As if on cue, the Hawks led by 19 points before halftime.
They won by the skinniest of points. The final was 102-101. Had Marcus Smart’s 75-foot heave at the buzzer crashed through the hoop, they wouldn’t have won at all.
We say again: Weird game.
For 24 minutes, this 4-versus-5 series seemed more of a mismatch than the 1-versus-8 Hawks-Nets set of last season ever did. The Hawks had a plan and executed it. The Celtics’ design was so ineffective that Stevens junked it after 24 minutes. The visitors opened the second half by deploying one man taller than 6-foot-6. This enabled them to make something of a game of it. It didn’t quite enable them to win.
The Hawks led 51-34 at the half. (They’d led by 19 four seconds before the break.) They’d dared the Celtics to make standing jump shots, which is something the C’s don’t do so well. The dare was taken. The jump shots were mostly missed.
Matters reached their nadir when Kent Bazemore blocked Avery Bradley’s runner. The Celtics took the offensive rebound. The ball came to Jae Crowder, the former Villa Rica High quarterback who hadn’t yet made a jumper. (Maybe he should have run the option.) He took a 16-footer. It clanked so hard it caromed back to Crowder, now behind the arc. He hoisted a 3-pointer. It clanked.
At the moment, the Celtics had missed 31 of 41 shots, 13 of 15 treys. They trailed 43-28. They looked, in a word, awful. Crowder would finish the half 1-for-10. The 5-9 Isaiah Thomas, on whom much depends, would score six first-half points against three turnovers. Given that they’d been outrebounded 26-17 and outshot 44.4 percent to 23.1, they were lucky not to be down 25.
Not for nothing is Stevens, formerly of Butler, regarded as one of the sharpest knives in the NBA drawer. Plan A had failed. Could Plan B do worse? At first it appeared it might. The smallish Celtics started the second half smacking the Hawks with such impunity that the home side was in the penalty one minute and 55 seconds into the third quarter. (Had that ever happened in any NBA game, let alone a playoff?)
Then the fouling stopped and the game got interesting, which is a polite way of saying, “downright scary.” The Celtics took to running, which was their only recourse, and the floor got scattered and the Hawks got rattled. By quarter’s end, lead was down to seven. Inside the final seven minutes, the Celtics seized the lead. (Crowder, of all people, nailed a trey.)
Forget winning with style and grace. The Hawks would have to dig deep simply to win. Sure enough, they dug and did. Bazemore’s layup off a deflection tied the score at 86-86. Al Horford’s fast-break basket off Jeff Teague’s feed after Paul Millsap blocked a Thomas drive put the Hawks up 90-88. Millsap’s jam made it a four-point game inside three minutes.
Teague’s bad pass and Kyle Korver’s missed 3-pointer — he was 0-for-7 on treys — left the Celtics with the ball and a chance to tie with 45.7 seconds left. Evan Turner hoisted a too-quick 3-pointer. The Hawks rebounded. Bazemore made two free throws. The lead was five, which proved just enough.
The Hawks had held their nerve and their serve. They lead the series 1-nil. But the Celtics we saw in the first half of Game 1 might well have made their final appearance of the series. Trying to play conventional basketball against this opponent didn’t work and probably won’t. Playing at warp speed against the older Hawks … that stands a chance.
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