BOSTON – With eight minutes to go before the end of a 4-game NBA Finals game, Golden State Warriors striker Nemanja Bjelica threw a pass straight to Boston Celtics baseman Marcus Smart and MVP. League on two occasions Stephen Curry dropped his shoulders, as if wondering. what else did he have to do to keep his team afloat against a younger, more athletic rival who had been superior up to that point in the series.
Curry threw his next pass to Boston’s Jaylen Brown, and the Celtics turned the consecutive losses of Golden State into a 91-86 lead. On the other side of the remaining 7:32 a 3-1 lead was expected for the best of seven sevens and three chances to win a championship, including one at home.
No one understood the odds of overcoming this deficit better than those Warriors, who are the only 36-team team in the NBA’s 75 seasons that have never had a 3-1 lead in the series in the finals. So they took the fourth game by force of will, beating the Celtics 14-3 for the next six minutes to win 107-97 and even the series.
This is one way of looking at it. The other? Boston took a golden opportunity to kill the three-time champions.
The Celtics devoted much of their post-match press conference to rightfully crediting Curry, who joined Michael Jordan and LeBron James as the only 34-year-old players to eclipse 40 points in a finals game. He was masterful, accumulating 43 points (14-26 FG, 7-14 3P, 8-9 FT), along with 10 rebounds and four assists, in 41 minutes.
“A lot of credit for him,” said Boston’s Al Horford, whose triple at 1:32 of the end fortunately ended a 10-0 streak of blood. “It’s been great tonight. I think you have to give him his credit when he needs the credit. He was just very tough and he made plays for his team and put them in a position to win the game. I have to give “Credit him.”
“Give him credit,” Brown said. “He’s one of the best players in the world.”
“You have to give them credit,” Celtics star Jayson Tatum said. “They’ve played well.”
“Credit to them,” Boston coach Ime Udoka said. “We knew it wouldn’t be easy.”
The story goes on
But everyone in the room understood the magnitude of the opening they had just given to Golden State.
Boston Celtics stars Jaylen Brown and Jayson Tatum missed 25 of their 43 shooting attempts in the fourth game of the NBA Finals. (Elsa / Getty Images)
“Would we have liked to have won today and been 3-1? That would have been the best case scenario,” said Tatum, whose 2-of-9 shot in the second half left 34% of the field for the series. . “But it’s the Finals. The art of competing. They came here with the feeling that they had to win. It wasn’t easy. That’s the beauty. It won’t be easy. It shouldn’t be. We know we both want it. , and we have to go get it. “
With his team leading by five, with the ball and series in hand, Tatum missed 23-foot isolation at the end of the pitch clock, the first of the Celtics’ nine errant attempts in their next 10 possessions, which includes the half of the fourth quarter. . Smart’s triple to beat another 24-second clock in a broken play was Boston’s only source of attack in that period. This gave the locals a 94-90 lead with 5:18 to go.
As the Celtics missed five consecutive three-point attempts, the Warriors continued to outscore them. Andrew Wiggins picked up an offensive rebound for a tray between two spectators. Klay Thompson caught Boston lost in the transition by a triple lead. Of course, no effort could have stopped Curry from scoring the next five points with a brilliant 15-foot float and a highly contested triple for a 100-94 lead.
Horford’s response was too late. Another offensive rebound and an unquestionable tray from Kevon Looney preceded another brutal Boston possession, and Curry weaved the entire Celtics defense during the first two of his five unanswered free throws for the past 48 seconds. It was a 17-3 blitz, or collapse, over the last five minutes, depending on how you see a 3-1 lead disappearing in a series of the best of three.
“We’ve been a bit of us all this playoff run,” Horford said of his team combining inconsistency with resilience.
The finals are far from over. It’s not the first time in the playoffs that these young Celtics have their hearts stopped, only to be revived twice before. They lost 14 points in the fourth quarter at home to trailing the Milwaukee Bucks 3-2 in the Eastern Conference semifinals, before winning the next two in the playoffs. The Miami Heat closed out the sixth game of the conference conference final in Boston with a 17-6 streak to extend the series, and the Celtics saved Game 7 on the road against another fearless veteran team.
“We don’t do that shit on purpose,” Tatum said. “I promise you not.”
Boston is now 7-0 after losses this postseason and will need at least one more at Golden State.
“It could have been an easier path, obviously, if you get the win tonight,” Udoka said. “That’s what it is. Now we’re 2-2. We know we can do it. We’ve done it before. Keep your head down and we’re going to catch one on the road.”
This defeat will haunt the Celtics for two days, or until the heart beats again, but tonight Curry, with black sweats coming out of the arena, with his hood pulled over his head, must have looked like the Grim Reaper.
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Ben Rohrbach is a Yahoo Sports writer. Do you have any advice? Email rohrbach_ben@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter! Follow @brohrbach